Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. Percona Kubernetes Operators

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.

Incentivized

Production ready, robust DB solution built for Kubernetes envs, we was able, for the first time, to ship production db workloads inside k8s. Be sure to check differences with "traditional" MySQL and other clustering solutions. Also be sure to match it with proper k8s storage solutions.

• 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

• Easy and fast deployment.
• A reliable, fully automated, high-available db lifecycle management solution.
• Exaustive documentation.
• Production ready.

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

Incentivized

• Some differences compared to "traditional" MySQL solution.
• Had some hard times trying to use it combined with pre-existing techs like WordPress, Magento, etc.
• The specific k8s environment features can have an impact on it, like the storage solutions offered by the cloud vendor.

Easy and fast deployment. A reliable, fully automated, high-available db lifecycle management solution. It requires a bit of learning time for people new to operators ecosystem.

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

Well documented, there was no need to contact support.

EKS is a Kubernetes technology and you need to learn Kubernetes and build a cluster before using it. So there's a learning curve here. ECS was easier to implement and simpler to have in our use case. It takes less time to run a workload and make it available.

For a long time we struggled finding a viable solution to migrate our existing db workloads inside Kubernetes. Before "operators era" proper db workloads required manual management, of course that easily raised administrative overhead. Then the future started to be brighter with the introduction of operators and the "official" Oracle's MySQL Operator, then Presslab's one, finally Percona's operator. Compared to other operators, the last one allowed us to ship production db workloads inside k8s.

• 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.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to use k8s on our entire infrastructure.
• Decreased administrative overhead around our db services.
• As it is an open source technology, it cut down our db pricings.