The main differences between EC2 and ECS

Elastic Compute Cloud vs Elastic Container Service

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the main differences between** EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and ECS (Elastic Container Service)**.

To make a difference between EC2 and ECS, we must understand what IaaS and CaaS are…

“Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a business model that delivers IT infrastructure like compute, storage, and network resources on a pay-as-you-go basis over the internet.”

One of the most well-known IaaS is AWS EC2.

“Containers as a Service (CaaS) is a cloud computing service that allows developers to manage and deploy containerized applications, giving businesses of all sizes access to portable, easily scalable cloud solutions.”

One of the most well-known CaaS is AWS ECS.

Business case

Let’s assume your company has an on-premises multi-container application and wants to deploy it on AWS. As a Solution Architect, what would be your recommended solution? Would you choose EC2 or ECS?

EC2 offers:

Full control — I mentioned earlier that EC2 is one of the most well-known IaaS, which means you will have full control. You will be able to control the operating system, storage, memory, CPU, network, etc. This includes tasks such as patching your instances and taking care of your containers.

Flexibility — You have the flexibility to choose the OS you prefer. For example, you want to choose Ubuntu or Windows instead of Amazon Linux 2023 to manage your containers.

Complexity — EC2 is the perfect option for complex infrastructure configurations and high customization

ECS offers:

Scalability — ECS provides better scalability instead of EC2. It provides more automated scaling options.

Managed Service — You don’t need to worry about the underlying hardware and infrastructure. Just upload the container(s) and that’s it.

Practicality — ECS Fargate is more practical and it’s a tool only for containers.

Time to start — It only takes a few seconds to start containers compared to EC2, which requires minutes.

Integration — It provides great integration with CI/CD tools, CloudWatch, and Load Balancer.

There is much more that EC2 and ECS offer, however, in this case, we have only touched on the basics

Conclusion

If you want to deploy a multi-container application, ECS is generally the better choice because it handles container orchestration better and you don't need to manage the infrastructure. If you want your application to scale independently and take advantage of built-in orchestration benefits, use ECS. In case you want to control the infrastructure yourself and have an identical environment as in development or testing, then use EC2.

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