AWS offers 3 mature container services, based on your organisation’s level of comfort with container deployments, use cases and cost constraints. The 3 most common deployments are ECS, EKS, and Fargate.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
- Amazon ECS is a highly scalable, fully managed container orchestration service.
- It enables you to run, scale, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of EC2 instances or AWS Fargate.
- ECS eliminates the need to manage the underlying infrastructure and automates tasks such as container deployment and scaling.
Example Scenario: Imagine you’re developing a microservices-based e-commerce platform. With Amazon ECS, you can containerise each microservice, such as user authentication, inventory management, and payment processing. ECS will handle the deployment, scaling, and load balancing of these containers, ensuring seamless integration and efficient resource utilization.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
- Amazon EKS is a managed service that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of Kubernetes clusters.
- It provides a highly available and secure platform for running containerised applications using Kubernetes.
- EKS takes care of the underlying infrastructure, allowing you to focus on deploying and managing your applications.
- More costly than ECS.
Example Scenario: Suppose you’re building a data analytics platform that processes large volumes of data. With Amazon EKS, you can deploy your analytics application using Kubernetes. EKS manages the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure, such as control plane management and worker node provisioning. This allows you to focus on data processing logic and leveraging Kubernetes features like autoscaling to handle varying workloads.
AWS Fargate
- AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that allows you to run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure.
- It simplifies the deployment and management of containers by abstracting away the server and cluster management.
- Fargate integrates with Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, making it easy to run containers at scale.
- Costs usually lie between ECS and EKS.
Example Scenario: Imagine you’re developing a chat application that requires real-time messaging capabilities. With AWS Fargate, you can deploy a containerised chat server. Fargate automatically manages the container resources, scaling up or down based on the number of active users. This ensures seamless communication and eliminates the need for manual infrastructure management.