Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers.
$0
per hour per GB
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…N/A
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Editions & Modules
AWS Fargate Launch Type Model
Spot price: $0.0013335. Ephemeral Storage Pricing: $0.000111
per hour per storage
Amazon EC2 Launch Type Model
Free
Amazon ECS on AWS Outposts
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsThere 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Considered Both Products
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Chose Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
We like Elastic Containers better because of the simplicity to create an application without losing control over it. It is simple, yet powerful, exposing only the parts that are needed without complicating the access to the nuts and bolts when more complicated adjustments are …
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Well, as we were in a state to compulsory implement this service, but then it is very suited for deployment of a service that has higher fault tolerance. And maintaining the lifecycle of custom made resources. And the ability to integrate other services also
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
We decided to give IBM a chance due to their initial on-boarding incentives, but we are very happy with our decision to leverage that opportunity.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
We did not select IBM Cloud Kubernetes over the others. Our objectives are to support each cloud vendor and be professional with our expertise and advice. IBM Cloud is a major enterprise vendor that we must support for our business.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
It's User friendly and simple to create CI CD jobs
Features
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
8.1
6 Ratings
2% above category average
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
7.8
18 Ratings
2% below category average
Security and Isolation9.06 Ratings7.618 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.55 Ratings8.218 Ratings
Cluster Management7.96 Ratings7.418 Ratings
Storage Management8.03 Ratings7.518 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization7.35 Ratings8.018 Ratings
Discovery Tools7.44 Ratings7.317 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks8.56 Ratings7.918 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery8.46 Ratings8.116 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging8.16 Ratings7.818 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.4 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(12 ratings)
7.5
(83 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(16 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(5 ratings)
8.7
(16 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(4 ratings)
7.7
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
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IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also stands out in environments where the workloads vary continuously and require befitting scale. The product excels particularly in microservices structures, wherein the companies would harness the capacity for container orchestration and automated scaling. Still, it may face the challenges due to monolith applications that have not been originally developed for using container technology.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
IBM
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
IBM
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
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.
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IBM
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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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IBM
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
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Online Training
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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.
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IBM
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is quite flexible platform with profitable Cloud functions performance and the data security through IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is nice. To manage container easily and process huge amount of data at the same time, the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is amazing ad the platform deployment is very easy after training.
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Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
IBM
  • Increased development speed and agility allows to build features faster and more economically.
  • Improved resource utilization helps keep applications running very efficiently, which saves on cloud service expenses.
  • Scalability and resilience allows for scaling up or down based on demand, which keeps applications running efficiently and more economically.
Read full review
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