Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Amazon EKS: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) are two popular container orchestration services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). While both services provide container management and deployment capabilities, they differ in several key aspects.

1. Integration with Kubernetes: Amazon EKS is fully managed Kubernetes service, which means it supports native Kubernetes APIs and tools. It allows you to leverage the entire Kubernetes ecosystem and take advantage of features such as rolling updates, service discovery, scaling, and self-healing capabilities out of the box. On the other hand, Amazon ECS is not based on Kubernetes, and it uses its own proprietary orchestration engine.

2. Ease of setup and management: Amazon EKS provides a simpler setup and management experience compared to Amazon ECS. With EKS, AWS takes care of the control plane, upgrades, and security patches, allowing you to focus on deploying and managing your applications. In contrast, Amazon ECS requires more manual setup and management as you need to manage the ECS cluster and associated resources.

3. Container scheduling and placement: Amazon EKS uses Kubernetes' powerful scheduler to determine where to place containers based on resource requirements, affinity, and anti-affinity rules. It provides advanced scheduling features such as daemonsets, statefulsets, and pod autoscaling. On the other hand, Amazon ECS provides its own scheduling mechanism, which is less flexible compared to Kubernetes. It offers task placement strategies like spread, binpack, and random, but lacks some of the advanced scheduling features found in Kubernetes.

4. Supported container runtimes: Amazon EKS supports multiple container runtimes, including Docker and containerd, giving you more flexibility in choosing the runtime for your containers. In contrast, Amazon ECS is primarily focused on Docker as the container runtime, although it also offers a compatibility mode for running other container runtimes.

5. Networking and integration options: Amazon EKS integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon VPC, and AWS CloudTrail. It provides robust networking capabilities, including VPC CNI (Container Network Interface) and the ability to use AWS PrivateLink for private network connectivity. While Amazon ECS also offers similar integrations and networking features, it may require additional configuration to achieve the same level of integration as EKS.

6. Community and ecosystem support: As Amazon EKS is based on Kubernetes, it benefits from the strong community support and an extensive ecosystem of tools, libraries, and plugins built around Kubernetes. This means you have access to a wide range of community-driven resources and solutions for deploying and managing your containers. In comparison, Amazon ECS has a smaller community and a narrower ecosystem compared to Kubernetes.

In summary, Amazon EKS provides full compatibility with Kubernetes, offers a simpler setup and management experience, supports multiple container runtimes, and benefits from the extensive Kubernetes ecosystem. On the other hand, Amazon ECS has its own proprietary orchestration engine, requires more manual management, and has a smaller community and ecosystem compared to EKS.