Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is well suited where you need the ease of managing the clusters by letting AWS do the stuff for you. Obviously, whenever you want to run the docker based workloads, it is always better to go for either AWS ECS or AWS EKS. If you are interested in staying at AWS only and don't want to be cloud-agnostic, then go for AWS ECS instead of AWS EKS. AWS ECS is cheaper than AWS EKS and also more managed by AWS and better integrated with other AWS services. If you want to run those workloads as serverless, then AWS ECS Fargate is the best option to go with. If you already have a Kubernetes based setup that you want to migrate to AWS, then go for AWS EKS instead of AWS ECS.

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Abdullah Khawer

DevOps Engineer

CallSign (Pvt.) Ltd.Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees

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The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it.Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:

Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure

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Borislav Traykov

DevOps Team Leader

CognyteInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Pros

One of the biggest advantages is the flexibility to change underlying EC2 instances. As the traffic or demand increases, we can easily change EC2 instances without any issues.
Amazon ECS APIs are extremely robust and one can start and stop containers by firing one post request only. So, it is not mandatory to keep the demo solutions up for every time. Just at the time of demo fire the command - make the container up and running - do the demo - down the container with API. A simple portal can control every container which helps non-technical (sales, marketing) to do the demo without keeping the solutions up for the entire time frame.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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It's super easy to get started - to creating a cluster to deploying your applications to it
Dead simple container orchestration and networking which can all be managed by yaml code
Support for docker
Auto scaling, upgrades and repairs of nodes in the cluster
Built-in application monitoring and logging using StackDriver
Automatic service discovery and DNS
Kubernetes is built and supported by Google

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Bhargav Nanekalva

Senior PHP Full Stack Developer

CloudSEKInternet, 51-200 employees

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Cons

A cleaner container service road map
It would be. nice to have more AI recommended cluster reductions
The UX could use some simplification

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Scott Kennedy

Director, eCommerce Analytics and Digital Marketing

Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees

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Not as intuitive as it could be
Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.0,013,335 per hour per GB

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Editions & Modules

Edition

AWS Fargate Launch Type Model	Spot price: $0.0013335. Ephemeral Storage Pricing: $0.000111¹
Amazon EC2 Launch Type Model	Free
Amazon ECS on AWS Outposts	Free

per hour per storage
none

Additional Pricing Details

There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS. You pay for AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments.

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.0,445 vCPU-hr Autopilot Mode

Google Kubernetes Engine Editions & Modules

Edition

Autopilot Mode - Regular Price	$0.0445¹
Autopilot Mode - Regular Price	$0.0049225²
Autopilot Mode - Regular Price	$0.0000548³
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price	$0.0133⁴
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price	$0.0014767⁵
Autopilot Mode - Spot Price	$0.0000548⁶
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)	$0.0356000⁷
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)	$0.0039380⁸
Autopilot Mode - 1 year commitment price (USD)	$0.0000438⁹
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)	0.0244750¹⁰
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)	0.0027074¹¹
Autopilot Mode - 3 year commitment price (USD)	0.0000301¹²
Standard Mode - Free Version	Free¹³
Standard Mode	$0.10¹³
Cluster Management	$0.10¹⁴
Cluster Management	$74.40 monthly credit¹⁵

vCPU Price vCPU-hr
GKE Autopilot Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot vCPU Price vCPU-hr
GKE Autopilot Pod Memory Price GB-hr
GKE Autopilot Ephemeral Storage Price GB-hr
per hour
per cluster per hour
per month per hour

Additional Pricing Details

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Google Kubernetes Engine 9.0

Based on 2 answers

Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly
Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly
Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files

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Verified User

Contributor in Other

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 501-1000 employees

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Support Rating

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) 8.6

Based on 7 answers

Support is relatively good, although the documentation sometimes is lacking, as well as outdated in our experience, especially when we initiated the process of using this service. But once we found how to assemble things, we haven't really required support from anyone at AWS, the service works without problems so we haven't had the need to contact support, which speaks well of how ECS is built.

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Francisco Javier Castaneda Marroquin

CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

Global Bestlogistics Systems S.A. de C.V.Computer Software, 11-50 employees

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Google Kubernetes Engine 8.9

Based on 6 answers

Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.

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Lukasz Stadnik

Cloud Architect

CloudicalComputer Networking, 501-1000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

If you are using AWS, you will be using Amazon ECS. I have also used Azure Container Instances and it works just as well in Azure as ECS does in AWS. It's really all a matter of what cloud provider you are utilizing. Because of the "Cloud Wars," it's difficult to measure cross-cloud connectivity, but I have had better luck remaining cloud agnostic in other cloud providers than AWS (Azure, GCP). Because of the sheer volume of tooling in AWS and inter-connectivity between them, it's almost easier to be fully AWS if you are using it in any kind of capacity.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.

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Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development

Computer & Network Security Company, 11-50 employees

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Professional Services

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Google Kubernetes Engine 9.0

Based on 1 answer

When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.

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Verified User

Contributor in Other

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

We achieved minimum downtime.
The autoscaling kept the performance of the services great.
We saved money by running the workloads on AWS ECS in Fargate mode by having different settings for different services to save on the hardware configuration side as well as having scheduled tasks.

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Abdullah Khawer

DevOps Engineer

CallSign (Pvt.) Ltd.Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees

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Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level.
Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway.
Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI.

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Borislav Traykov

DevOps Team Leader

CognyteInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees

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