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Amazon EC2 Container Service

Container management service that supports Docker containers

What is Amazon EC2 Container Service?

Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
Amazon EC2 Container Service is a tool in the Containers as a Service category of a tech stack.

Who uses Amazon EC2 Container Service?

Companies
1850 companies reportedly use Amazon EC2 Container Service in their tech stacks, including Amazon, Udemy, and Instacart.

Developers
11806 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Amazon EC2 Container Service.

Amazon EC2 Container Service Integrations

Docker, Amazon EC2, Datadog, AWS Fargate, and Amazon CodeGuru are some of the popular tools that integrate with Amazon EC2 Container Service. Here's a list of all 20 tools that integrate with Amazon EC2 Container Service.
Pros of Amazon EC2 Container Service
100
Backed by amazon
72
Familiar to ec2
53
Cluster based
42
Simple API
26
Iam roles
7
Scheduler
7
Cluster management
7
Programmatic Control
4
Container-enabled applications
4
Socker support
2
No additional cost
1
Easy to use and cheap
Decisions about Amazon EC2 Container Service

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon EC2 Container Service in their tech stack.

Deep Shah
Software Engineer at Amazon · | 6 upvotes · 940.3K views

I only know Java and so thinking of building a web application in the following order. I need some help on what alternatives I can choose. Open to replace components, services, or infrastructure.

  • Frontend: AngularJS, Bootstrap
  • Web Framework: Spring Boot
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB
  • Authentication: Auth0
  • Deployment: Amazon EC2 Container Service
  • Local Testing: Docker
  • Marketing: Mailchimp (Separately Export from Auth0)
  • Website Domain: GoDaddy
  • Routing: Amazon Route 53

PS: Open to exploring options of going completely native ( AWS Lambda, AWS Security but have to learn all)

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Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 748.4K views
Shared insights
at

In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 7 upvotes · 496.9K views

We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.

The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.

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Cyril Duchon-Doris

We build a Slack app using the Bolt framework from slack https://api.slack.com/tools/bolt, a Node.js express app. It allows us to easily implement some administration features so we can easily communicate with our backend services, and we don't have to develop any frontend app since Slack block kit will do this for us. It can act as a Chatbot or handle message actions and custom slack flows for our employees.

This app is deployed as a microservice on Amazon EC2 Container Service with AWS Fargate. It uses very little memory (and money) and can communicate easily with our backend services. Slack is connected to this app through a ALB ( AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) )

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Blog Posts

GitHubGitPython+22
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GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
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Jobs that mention Amazon EC2 Container Service as a desired skillset

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Amazon EC2 Container Service's Features

  • Docker Compatibility
  • Managed Clusters
  • Programmatic Control
  • Task Definitions
  • Scheduler
  • Docker Repository

Amazon EC2 Container Service Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2 Container Service?
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Google Kubernetes Engine
Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machine cluster, scaling your application, and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.
Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a technology for Amazon ECS and EKS* that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers.
Azure Kubernetes Service
Deploy and manage containerized applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service. It offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence.
See all alternatives

Amazon EC2 Container Service's Followers
9890 developers follow Amazon EC2 Container Service to keep up with related blogs and decisions.