What is the difference between Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2

Question

Is ECS just a docker install in EC2? If I already have a EC2, then I start a ECS, does it mean I have two instance?

Answer 1

EC2 allows you to launch individual instances which you can use for pretty much whatever you like. ECS is a container service, which means it will launch instances that will be ready to launch container applications. The main distinction between the two services is that with EC2 you have to manage each instance separately in whatever method you choose (manually, using a CM tool or any other way) - deploy your applications and maintain the connection between the servers yourself. ECS allows you to launch a cluster of machines that will serve as the deployment ground of your container apps, allowing you to treat all instances in the cluster as one big instance available for your container workload.

And to answer your question - You can start an ECS cluster with no instances in it, but then it won't be able to run anything on it. Once you register an EC2 instance inside an ECS cluster, containers are ready to run in it. So the bottom line is - you can use both ECS and EC2 with only one instance, but that is not the actual use case these services were built for.

Answer 2

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) lets you run Docker containers without having to manage the orchestration of those containers. With ECS, you can deploy your containers on EC2 servers or in a serverless mode, which Amazon calls Fargate. Both deployment types handle the orchestration and underlying server management for you, so you can just schedule and deploy your containers. Combined with AWS Fargate, it allows you to run containers without selecting servers.

Amazon ECS can work for both long-running jobs and short bursts of tasks, and includes tools for adjusting the scale of the container fleet as well as the scheduling of those containers. Task placement definitions let you choose which instances get which containers, or you can let AWS manage this by spreading across all Availability Zones.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is AWS’s core computing product and provides resizable, scalable computing capacity in the cloud. Amazon offers a range of EC2 instance types, optimized for various workloads and usage requirements. As AWS has continued to add options to EC2, there are now EC2 instance types for almost any application. In AWS, servers are called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) “Instances”.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks!

Answer 3

Hi,

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.

Whereas, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Customers such as Duolingo, Samsung, GE, and Cookpad use ECS to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability.

Answer 4

AWS EC2 users can configure their own virtual machines (VMs), choose pre-configured machine images (MIs), or customize MIs. Users have the freedom to choose the size, power, memory capacity, and number of VMs they wish to use. 

Azure users, on the other hand, chose a virtual hard disk (VHD) to create a VM. This can be pre-configured by Microsoft, the user, or a separate third party. It relies on virtual scale sets for scalability purposes. AWS Training in Gurgaon.