Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. Huawei Cloud Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) vs. Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

Amazon ECS is well suited for the scenarios where you want to deploy a microservice to a cloud and instead of manually specifying instance size, number of instances and then specifying the configurations and connecting it with other cloud services like database service, secret manager service etc., you just want to specify these configurations as a file and using that file, the ECS would deploy the service and keep it healthy. It might be less suited for a scenario when you don't want to stick to AWS specific solution for your microservice deployment. The ECS configuration file is specific to AWS ECS and may not be useful for other cloud providers like Azure etc.

Incentivized

I honestly believe that it is well suited for companies, whose sole requirement is robust accessibility. Since the training part for admin takes a lot of time, I feel that it might not be suitable for small companies who are still looking to grow. Also, the product sometimes faces scaling issues and I feel like it might not be appropriate for smaller companies as they might look to expand in the future.

Incentivized

[Mirantis Cloud Native Suite (Docker Enterprise)] is the most advanced tool till now, which works as a VMs
and separates any single application from the dependencies. Also, this tool is
helping me in the agile development of the processes. It is strongly recommended to
almost all major organizations.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Isolated private networks on the cloud
• Two-way migration feature
• Flexible network deployment

Incentivized

• Containers - Docker is the go-to when using Containers, which are super useful if you need an environment that works both for Windows and Linux
• Efficiency - Docker is very lightweight and doesn't demand too much from your CPU or server
• CI/CD - Docker is excellent for plumbing into your build pipeline. It integrates nicely, is reliable, and has an easy set up.

Incentivized

• Another AWS Service - While AWS has a service for just about everything, that is also a negative point. There is no service that does 4 out of 4 things you need. This service does 3 out of 4, another service does the fourth thing you need and another two things that the other service does.
• With AWS things in general, it's really hard to remain cloud agnostic. Keep that in mind.

Incentivized

• It's a little tricky to use, you will need training for maintenance
• UI can be changed a bit in order to make it more user-friendly
• Sometimes has scaling issues

Incentivized

• Containers are often opaque - if a container doesn't work out of the box, it's messy to fix.
• Logging is complexified by the multiple containers and logs are often not piped to places you expect them to be.
• Networking is complexified due to internal port mapping between containers, etc.

Incentivized

Aside from some ECS-specific terms to learn at first, learning & starting to use ECS is relatively straightforward. AWS docs on the topic are also of high quality, with sound & relevant examples to follow. Troubleshooting container issues is also a breeze thanks to CloudWatch integration & helpful error messages on the AWS console.

Incentivized

Docker's CLI has a lot of options, and they aren't all intuitive. And there are so many tools in the space (Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, etc) that have their own configuration as well. So while there is a lot to learn, most concepts transfer easily and can be learned once and applied across everything.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The community support for Docker is fantastic. There is almost always an answer for any issue I might encounter day-to-day, either on Stack Overflow, a helpful blog post, or the community Slack workspace. I've never come across a problem that I was unable to solve via some searching around in the community.

Incentivized

I chose Amazon ECS over Amazon EKS and other products because the whole infrastructure was decided to be designed on AWS cloud and Amazon ECS made it easier to make the clusters live in just a few minutes. Amazon ECS has better integration with other AWS services and we don't have to look for plugins to do the things, everything is available and can be configured from the AWS console.

Incentivized

I'd like to point out that Huawei Cloud Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is very simple to use and operate, and we can easily perform operations on it using the documents that are available on its support site. We can easily download the documents from the site, which are very useful for doing any configuration on the cloud and for operations.The security level is very good; enabling traffic and defining security rules is extremely simple utilizing their cloud portal in GUI form, which makes it simple to use, and the performance is also good; they provide a variety of solutions to meet customer needs.

Incentivized

We've used XAMPP, PHPmyAdmin and similar local environments (our app is on PHP). Because of how easy you can change the configuration of libraries on PHP and versions (which is SO painful on XAMPP or other friendly LAMP local servers) we are using Docker right now. Also, being sure that the environment is exactly the same makes things easier for developing.

Incentivized

• Easy to manage as it has an orchestrator to manage the containers.
• Less costs and more flexibility with Fargate.
• Negative (tied to AWS, so could not easily integrate other tools like running a Redis cluster. Still, it works but not easily like Kubernetes.

• Solved a huge issue of accessibility from different geographical zones
• Since it was cheaper than the current one, this business decision did save some costs
• Helped solving concurrent transaction saving issues

Incentivized

• Docker has made it possible for us to deploy code faster, increasing the productivity of our development teams.
• Docker has made it possible for us to decentralize our build and release system. This means that teams can deploy on their own schedule and our dev ops team can concentrate on building better tools rather than deploying for the teams
• Docker has allowed us to virtualize our entire development process and made it much simpler to build out new data centers. This, in turn, is significantly increasing our ROI by providing a path forward for internationalization.

Incentivized