Pros and cons of Amazon ECS
January 06, 2025

Pros and cons of Amazon ECS

Animesh Kumar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

We use Amazon Elastic Container Service(ECS) for deploying our production services. So, it is the backbone of our infrastructure. All the microservices are deployed on ECS in EC2 instances.
For any SaaS application like ours, we need to deploy it on cloud and that's where ECS comes into picture.
ECS is special in the sense that it takes care of the orchestration and we only need to specify the instance size, number of instances and other configurations to connect with other services like RDS for database and Secret Manager for credentials etc. and it takes care of the deployment.

Pros

  • It takes care of the deployment life cycle by using just a configuration file
  • It takes care of the scaling as well and monitors the health of the services
  • It does the version management as well and if we need to roll back to a previous version, we need not do it via SCM tools like git, we can simply deploy a previous version from ECS console itself.

Cons

  • The user interface sometimes seem to be confusing and cumbersome. It can be improved so that people can understand clearly which section to go for which functionality.
  • When a container fails, the error logs are not readily available on the ECS console. If it can be provided it would be easier to debug from there itself instead of going to our log manager.
  • Sometimes the old EC2 containers become stale and need to be restarted manually. There should be a notification for such scenarios. We have mostly been finding it out on our own and then fixing it by manually restarting EC2 instances.
  • If this could be proactively monitored and notified, it would be great.
  • Amazon ECS has solved the problem of deploying our service to cloud and making it highly scalable and available and managing the lifecycle of the container.
  • We've achieved 99.8 % of uptime because of self-healing capabilities of ECS and its scalability.
  • It has made it easy to configure testing environments with lower configurations and lower costs as we need less compute power in testing environments and we can specify less number of instances with less memory for such environments.
Though, its user interface is somewhat dreadful but it is able to solve our problem of taking the services to the cloud with minimal work for configuring the application infrastructure. We just need to specify the configuration once and it can deploy using the same every time and self heal if there is any issue with any of the container.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a good beginner level orchestration service but lacks container management and scaling capabilities.
EC2 is again not a Managed cloud service. It is like just renting a computer on cloud and then managing it on our own.
Compared to these ECS is a comprehensive solution that provides management, scaling, containerization and other service connectivity out of the box.

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

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
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.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Feature Ratings

Container Management
7.8
Security and Isolation
9
Container Orchestration
9
Cluster Management
7
Storage Management
6
Resource Allocation and Optimization
6
Discovery Tools
8
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks
10
Self-Healing and Recovery
9
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging
6

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