Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Amazon EKS

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Amazon EC2 Container Service

13.9K
9.9K
+ 1
325
Amazon EKS

907
470
+ 1
3
Add tool

Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Amazon EKS: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) are two popular container orchestration services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). While both services provide container management and deployment capabilities, they differ in several key aspects.

  1. Integration with Kubernetes: Amazon EKS is fully managed Kubernetes service, which means it supports native Kubernetes APIs and tools. It allows you to leverage the entire Kubernetes ecosystem and take advantage of features such as rolling updates, service discovery, scaling, and self-healing capabilities out of the box. On the other hand, Amazon ECS is not based on Kubernetes, and it uses its own proprietary orchestration engine.

  2. Ease of setup and management: Amazon EKS provides a simpler setup and management experience compared to Amazon ECS. With EKS, AWS takes care of the control plane, upgrades, and security patches, allowing you to focus on deploying and managing your applications. In contrast, Amazon ECS requires more manual setup and management as you need to manage the ECS cluster and associated resources.

  3. Container scheduling and placement: Amazon EKS uses Kubernetes' powerful scheduler to determine where to place containers based on resource requirements, affinity, and anti-affinity rules. It provides advanced scheduling features such as daemonsets, statefulsets, and pod autoscaling. On the other hand, Amazon ECS provides its own scheduling mechanism, which is less flexible compared to Kubernetes. It offers task placement strategies like spread, binpack, and random, but lacks some of the advanced scheduling features found in Kubernetes.

  4. Supported container runtimes: Amazon EKS supports multiple container runtimes, including Docker and containerd, giving you more flexibility in choosing the runtime for your containers. In contrast, Amazon ECS is primarily focused on Docker as the container runtime, although it also offers a compatibility mode for running other container runtimes.

  5. Networking and integration options: Amazon EKS integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon VPC, and AWS CloudTrail. It provides robust networking capabilities, including VPC CNI (Container Network Interface) and the ability to use AWS PrivateLink for private network connectivity. While Amazon ECS also offers similar integrations and networking features, it may require additional configuration to achieve the same level of integration as EKS.

  6. Community and ecosystem support: As Amazon EKS is based on Kubernetes, it benefits from the strong community support and an extensive ecosystem of tools, libraries, and plugins built around Kubernetes. This means you have access to a wide range of community-driven resources and solutions for deploying and managing your containers. In comparison, Amazon ECS has a smaller community and a narrower ecosystem compared to Kubernetes.

In summary, Amazon EKS provides full compatibility with Kubernetes, offers a simpler setup and management experience, supports multiple container runtimes, and benefits from the extensive Kubernetes ecosystem. On the other hand, Amazon ECS has its own proprietary orchestration engine, requires more manual management, and has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to EKS.

Decisions about Amazon EC2 Container Service and Amazon EKS
Andres Paredes
Lead Senior Software Engineer at InTouch Technology · | 3 upvotes · 83.3K views

If you want to integrate your cluster and control end to end your pipeline with AWS tools like ECR and Code Pipeline your best option is ECS using a EC2 instance. There are pros and cons but it's easier to integrate using cloud formation templates and visual UI for approvals, etc. ECS is free, you need to pay only for the EC2 instance but unfortunately, it is not standard then you cannot use standard tools to see and manage your Kubernetes. EKS in the other hand uses standard Kubernates definitions but you need to pay for the service and also for the EC2 instance(s) you have in your cluster.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Amazon EC2 Container Service
Pros of Amazon EKS
  • 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
  • 1
    Better control
  • 1
    Possibility to log in into the pods
  • 1
    Broad package manager using helm

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

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.

What is 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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jobs that mention Amazon EC2 Container Service and Amazon EKS as a desired skillset
What companies use Amazon EC2 Container Service?
What companies use Amazon EKS?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon EC2 Container Service or Amazon EKS.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Amazon EC2 Container Service?
What tools integrate with Amazon EKS?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

Rancher Labs

KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
5
1488
DockerAmazon EC2Scala+8
6
2705
GitHubGitPython+22
17
14199
GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
12
6560
What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2 Container Service and Amazon EKS?
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.
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.
Hyper
Hyper.sh is a secure container hosting service. What makes it different from AWS (Amazon Web Services) is that you don't start servers, but start docker images directly from Docker Hub or other registries.
See all alternatives