Amazon Elastic Container Service is a fully managed container orchestration service offered by Amazon AWS. Amazon ECS is being adopted by many companies such as Dueling, Samsung, and Ubisoft because of its scalability, reliability, and security strengths.
Many organizations who move to the cloud find themselves migrating monolithic applications and systems. To handle increasing loads and scalability, teams are experimenting with microservice architecture by decoupling their monolithic apps. Thankfully Amazon ECS streamlines this process by providing administrators and engineers container orchestration capabilities to manage and control containerized independent services.
Another use case scenario for Amazon ECS includes batch jobs and the management capabilities brought to the table with Amazon ECS and AWS Batch. AWS Batch uses the Amazon ECS Agent to execute and carry out containerized jobs that run specific tasks. AWS Batch enables engineers to manage easily, run, and scale batch operations from tens to hundreds and thousands of containerized compute jobs.
Basic components of Amazon ECS are Docker containers running on an EC2 instance, or you could go serverless by lounging services and tasks using AWS Fargate. But before we go any further, to fully understand how Amazon ECS works and why it’s so powerful, one must first understand Docker.
Docker is a client-server development application that containerized applications in a lightweight environment containing all necessary dependencies that specific applications may need to run. In addition, multiple different containers can be run on a single machine, making Docker very popular with developers when decoupling applications of running specific job types in batch.
Amazon ECS is best used with:
– Machine learning – Machine learning (ML) models can be easily containerized for training and inference with Amazon ECS. ML models can be created with loosely coupled, distributed services that can be placed on various platforms or close to the data that’s being analyzed by the application.
– Microservices – Amazon ECS assists in the operation of microservices applications by providing native integration to AWS and enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
– Virtual machines – The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service can be used to create and operate Linux virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud; these VMs are called instances. Developers can specify rules for the isolated sets of EC2 instances, increasing computing performance and portability by running on top of a host operating system.
– Migrating apps to the cloud
– Legacy enterprise applications can be feasibly containerized and migrated to Amazon ECS without necessitating any code changes.
– Batch processing – Batch workloads can be run with custom or managed schedulers on AWS On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances.
Benefits of Amazon ECS:
– Improved security – Amazon ECR and ECS collaborate to provide optimal application security.
-Cost-efficient – Amazon ECS allows developers to schedule various containers on the same node, thus achieving high density on Amazon EC2.
– Performance at scale – Thousands of Docker containers can be launched in seconds without any additional complexity using Amazon ECS. That is because the service is built on technology that has been developed from years of experience running highly scalable services.
Improved compatibility: The container-based pipeline helps eliminate any issues that may arise due to deployments functioning differently in various environments.
– Designed for collaboration with other AWS services – Integration of Amazon ECS with other AWS services, such as Amazon ECR and AWS ELB, provides users with a complete solution for running various containerized applications and services.
– Manageable at any scale – Operating cluster management software and creating fault-tolerant clusters is unnecessary when using Amazon ECS. Since there is no software to install, scale, and manage, developers can focus on building their container-based applications.
– Extensible – Amazon ECS offers total visibility and control of the AWS resources, thus allowing it to be easily integrated or extended through APIs.