Introduction
Today we will compare and contrast the Amazon AWS ECS vs EKS technologies that is offered in their ecosystem. AWS is a vast ecosystem with different services but one of the things you will probably stumble upon if you are working with containers is doing some form of orchestration. As your company and services grow so will the load and the number of containers you may have in your network. Eventually it becomes vital to have some method of managing all of them, doing configuration updates and scaling them. This article focuses specifically how this can be done in the Amazon AWS ecosystem particular two services:
- AWS ECS – Elastic container service
- AWS EKS – Elastic kubernetes service
As a brief summary for those not familiar with what they do, they both solve the problem we described above but they do have slight variations which we will go over in this article with hopes to let you decide which is best for you. Please keep in mind that this article isn’t meant to tell you which is the best solution I’m merely trying to give you information as this may be different based on your circumstances.
I have been working in the Software industry for over 23 years now and I have been a software architect, manager, developer and engineer.
I am a machine learning and crypto enthusiast with emphasis in security. I have experience in various industries such as entertainment, broadcasting,
healthcare, security, education, retail and finance.
Difference table between ECS vs EKS
| ECS | EKS | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Cheap | More Costly |
| Learning Curve | Easy | Hard |
| Configuration | Easy | Involved |
| Maintainance | Easy | Average |
| Performance | Fast | Fast |
Which is Faster ECS or EKS
When it comes to performance both of them are pretty equal. Since EKS gives you the flexibility to fine tune your settings based on various attributes there’s a chance of making a mistake and this may end up being costly in performance. Inversely since you can customize so many things it can also work to your advantage and end up being faster for you in the long run especially if you have some special cases that cannot be met with the ECS limited configuration. Overall for the average user and in most cases you will not really notice any performance differences between the two so do not put too much weight on your decision based on the speed and performance of the technologies.
How easy is it to learn ECS vs EKS
In my opinion one of the most important things for someone to decide is what learning curve it has to get going. Let me start by saying in this scenario the answer is simple, if you do not have a lot of time and do not have specific needs the learning curve for AWS ECS is much easier than AWS EKS. Amazon takes away a lot of the underlying details involved with managing a service and abstracts it in an easy to setup wizard on their website. You can be up and running in a few minutes time using AWS ECS whereas with AWS EKS you will need to do a bit more digging and setup. This is a fairly easy point and you really don’t need to over think it. They say the simpler solutions are the easier ones.
Which is cheaper ECS or EKS
For most people this is not an issue but if you are a bigger organization that is trying to keep costs down and still be able to stay in the cloud cost is part of your decision of which service is the best to go with. AWS ECS wins this one too as it’s considered free tier at the beginning and generally the pricing is much lower than AWS EKS. The main advantage here is that you can do your testing and deployment with AWS ECS initially and if you are not missing anything you can keep going without having to pay the price tag that you would do otherwise for AWS EKS.
When making a consideration and let’s assume that money is not a problem the choice of weighing in performance and your needs is much more important than the cost. I believe in both cases the difference especially for enterprises is negligible and you can safely go with either of the two options. However if you are really on a budget and you can’t absolutely spend anymore money on this go with ECS.
Which is easier to configure ECS or EKS
This section basically covers what flexibility each of the services gives you in terms of configuration and adaptability on what you can do. Personally I like to setup things the way I want and be able to fine tune everything. This means going into the nitty gritty details of a setup and be able to easily revert back whenever I want. I also like to use the kubectl command line to manage my containers from a terminal without having to load up the AWS console or have to memorize the syntax of the AWS command line tool. However most people starting out and some smaller organizations may not want to do this and prefer to keep things simpler. The truth is that if you don’t have a lot of requirements and don’t really care about every single detail you will find yourself leaning towards AWS ECS. Since AWS EKS does give you the options and this section is about adaptability of your setup I have to give the winning point to AWS EKS.
Overall I believe configuration is something that you do once when you setup your system and then it’s something you typically forget. If you are finding yourself requiring a lot of changes and customizations as I mentioned above then EKS might be a better solution for you.
Which is easier to maintain ECS or EKS
This is a difficult one to answer. Strictly speaking I consider maintaining something based on the skill level of the end user. If you are familiar already with Kubernetes and have maintained clusters in the past the choice here might be challenging for you to decide, or you may want to go with the one you are more familiar with. If you don’t have any experience managing clusters and this is a new area for you then it might be easier to go with AWS ECS. The reason being is that Amazon abstracts a lot of the work you have to do behind the scenes like it does with doing your initial setup. However the problem rises if you need to start doing changes and adjustments to your cluster you may find yourself destroying and recreating the whole thing as it’s not very adaptable. If you are unsure after having read the above start with ECS and weigh in the previous sections to your overall decision.
Conclusion
If you went over the previous sections and you are still uncertain as to what you want to go with I think go with the simpler solution with is AWS ECS. Overall you will have to do less work to get things going and it may just cover all your needs. If you see that it’s not working out you can always change easily as both live in the AWS ecosystem and integrate well with other services such as cloudwatch and EC2. Hope you find this educational enough and have helped you make a decision.
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Which container technology you like the best?
