Let's get into it…
When it comes to running containers in AWS, we have multiple options to choose from. Two services that probably come to your mind are Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Elastic Container Service (ECS). We will help you to make a choice by comparing three key points.
Key Points
Community
Ease of adoption
Pricing
What is EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that AWS offers to run Kubernetes in its cloud environment. EKS simplifies the Kubernetes adoption by offloading the control plane management, simplifying the upgrade process, and enabling seamless integration with AWS services.
With EKS, the barrier to entry has been lowered, and small organizations can enjoy one of the most significant open-source projects available.
What is ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is an AWS native container orchestration solution. ECS is built with tight integration with the AWS ecosystem, is highly scalable, and offers simplicity for any developer to adopt. With Amazon ECS, users can quickly and easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications from their web page.
ECS enables users to enjoy the benefits of container orchestration solution with a slight learning curve and as little friction with infrastructure management as possible.
Community
EKS allows us to use one of the most significant open-source projects that's currently available. On top of that, kubernetes has been ground zero for hundreds of open-source and enterprise projects. These projects allow you to extend, customize, and adjust the Kubernetes environment to fit your business needs. There are many blogs, videos, and other information sources, so support is easily reached.
Based on Enlyft information, we know that more than 90K companies are currently working with Kubernetes in their tech stack. This means more case studies about kubernetes, more developers, and more DevOps engineers who are familiar with the ecosystem.
ECS, in the other hand, dosent enjoy the community size that EKS enjoy. Because ECS is unique service for AWS there is less information available for us. With ECS we have higher dependency on AWS customer support for the best and for the worse.
Based on Enlyft information, we know that more than 1k companies use ECS. This means that the service has been adopted by a wide range of companies and has number of case studies.
We will probably have a harder time finding experienced individuals, but ECS simplifies many things, and the learning curve is manageable for many newcomers.
Ease of adoption
As been said, EKS removes operational load from us, such as control plane management and easier upgrades process. But Kubernetes is highly flexible and allows us to fit it to our needs. That flexibility comes with a big learning curve where we need to understand the following points:
Kubernetes resources such as statefulset, deployments and other resources
Opensource projects that enhance and improve the experience of working with Kubernetes
How to implement successful CI/CD flows
How to work with kubernetes, if it’s with the CLI or with IDE
Understand how to work with EKS, which has some unique features
The learning curve associated with kubernetes can alert some organizations to go down this route. If this is something you can associate with, email us, and we will try to help you use one of the best open-source projects in your organization.
ECS is known for its simplicity more over when it comes to Fargate (zero management on the underlying infra). You can find Everything you need to be aware of in AWS documentation and support. With that being said if you pick ECS, you will need to cover the following:
ECS terminology as a task, task def, service, AWS cloud map, and so on.
How to implement CI/CD flows.
Best practices implementation when it comes to ECS.
So, from the first site, ECS would probably be easier to adopt, but we are not going to enjoy as much the flexibility that comes with EKS and the opensource projects surrounding it.
Pricing
EKS and ECS had a similar pricing model regarding the following points.
Compute - You will need to pay for the compute you will use (EC2 or Fargate). The prices differ based on instance types, the number of used instances, whether you are using spot, saving plan, or reserved instance.
Other - There are different costs that we need to be aware of, such as networking and storage.
EKS also has a flat rate of 0.1$ per hour, which can accumulate to 72$ per month.
Our Honest recommendation
For simple use cases where you just want to run your application workloads with limited flexibility, ECS can be a great option, even more when it combines Fargate. If you need a flexible, cloud-agnostic solution with a large community and hundreds of projects that endorse the ecosystem, then EKS is for you.
To Conclude,
There will probably always be an active Reddit thread on this topic and another blog post about it, which you can read about. I hope that this blog helped you figure out how you want to proceed.
