What are the Differences between Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a vast cloud platform supporting 200+ products and services. In this huge AWS universe, there is some confusion about two of its most popular offerings: Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Both services contain the word “elastic” and have similar names so the confusion is natural.

Nonetheless, ECS and EC2 are two very different services. Let’s explore these differences.

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon ECS is a fast, scalable container orchestration service. A container is a way to package application code so it can run predictably and reliably on any computer. Of course, creating and launching containers can get tedious over time. ECS makes the process easy.

With ECS, you can quickly launch thousands of containers on-demand using your preferred automation and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools. The service is fully managed so you can focus on building applications instead of worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 provides secure compute for applications and allows you to optimize application performance and cost. Using this web-based compute platform will enable you to access scalable cloud infrastructure on-demand instead of having to buy and maintain your own (expensive) hardware.

EC2 provides the flexibility of 500+ instance types and numerous processors, operating systems, and storage and networking options to match your workload needs. These instances can be easily scaled up or down so you can increase or decrease the computing capacity required to run your applications and meet their traffic demands.

Amazon ECS vs. Amazon EC2

The major difference between Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2 is that ECS is a way to orchestrate Docker containers while EC2 is a compute service. ECS will allow you to treat all instances in the cluster as one big instance for your container workload while EC2 provides on-demand infrastructure that enables many kinds of workloads to run on AWS.

Simply put, ECS is a good way to run containers insideEC2 instances. You can launch individual instances with EC2 and use them for any kind of workload. You manage these instances and have full control over your infrastructure.

Thus, the two services work together and are complementary, rather than competitive. But they don’t have to because EC2 is not the only way to run containers with ECS. You can also run them on a serverless infrastructure that’s fully managed and controlled by AWS Fargate.

One similarity between the services is that ECS resources are scalable just like EC2. But where they differ is that ECS scales container clusters on-demand whereas EC2 scales compute resources.

Conclusion

In sum, Amazon EC2 offers scalable computing power for many kinds of workloads and Amazon ECS provides a way to run scalable containers and scale containerized applications. If you need further support with these services, contact Axcess.io.