Item: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ECS to run our containerised applications and on fargate instances so we don't need to worry about managing EC2 instances. It's highly available and reliable where we run our production workloads.

Pros and Cons

Fault tolerance.
Availability
Scaling
Pricing is fair and reasonable.

Logging part is not so easy.
local exec into fargate container is complicated.
The UX/UI part is complicated.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

GitLab, RabbitMQ, Redis™*

Likelihood to Recommend

To begin with it's still not Kubernetes. Kubernetes has more native support and easily integrated with a lot of tools. With ECS you're more tied to what AWS provides regarding logging monitoring. ECS can be used as solution if you're trying to run simple workloads where you dont need a lot of computation power. You can have a good implementation to save some money. If you're using Fargate, you will be billed to what vCPU and memory your application is requesting.Again, it depends on your use case and what do you want to achieve.

My personal experience with ECS.

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)