Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. IBM Cloud Managed Istio

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

Clearly, the [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] tool is very useful when you have multiple services and each service is connecting with other services through APIs in different networks. To manage this type of complex network, [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] is very useful. It comes with a license that can increase the billing of your project so make sure if your application network mesh, monitoring cannot be managed on your own then you can use it. If your application is not very complex then you have many tools available like Grafana, Prometheus, Sumo Logic, which you can integrate individually with your cluster and implement. In this type of scenario, it is better to not use [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] and it will serve your purpose as well.

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

• Layers transparently onto existing applications
• Allows control of access and rules to be developed
• Creates metrics for usage

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

• Some more functionalities added could improve it better.
• Better technical user guidance.

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

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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Training and usage support available

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

• 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.

• It reduced the complexity of network mesh (ingress/egress services).
• One tool with many solutions. No need to integrate monitoring tools or notification tools.
• It reduced the number of lines of YAML code.
• It reduced the number of labor hours.

Incentivized