Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers.
$0
per hour per GB
JFrog Artifactory
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
JFrog Artifactory is a software repository management solution for enterprises available on-premise or from the cloud, presented as a single solution for housing and managing all the artifacts, binaries, packages, files, containers, and components for use throughout the software supply chain. JFrog Artifactory serves as a central hub for DevOps, integrating with tools and processes to improve automation, increase integrity, and incorporate best practices along the way.
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.
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Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
JFrog Artifactory
Features
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
JFrog Artifactory
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
It works at scale and a large number of accessible pipelines for searching, repository updates and indexing will become easier. JFrog provides end-to-end solutions for all DevOps needs. With this, Jfrog Artifactory specifically implements the management of highly available repositories, with a smooth interface and integration with all the main CI tools on the market.
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.
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.
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.
The main problem that seems intractable is getting the checksum of the artifact. Managing container artifacts is a game changer for us during project execution, as the container artifact type exposes all base image and Docker file steps. This makes debugging or analysis easier. Jfrog Artifactory provides promotion feature and can automated from one environment repo to another environment repo before the deployment occurs.
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.
Support tickets take days to respond. The most basic of questions that should be knocked out in a few hours don't get answers for days. Tickets are also closed without resolution.
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.
JFrog Artifactory has a much more friendly GUI, making package exploration less of a chore to do. Other than that, their features are pretty much comparable to each other. Both support multiple types of packages; both have API that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.
So many times it happens at the time of dependency resolution some of the servers are down e.g NPM, Maven central, PiPy in that cause our builds starts failing. By proxying these repositories with JFrog this is never happened again.
It reduced the additional cost of container image registry and management effort.
Support of integration with Build, Monitoring, and CI tools resulted in smooth automation and management.
