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Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable and speedy container management service that allows virtual environments to run, stop, and manage containers on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article, we discuss Amazon ECS and what it is used for, as well as some of its benefits and features.
Read more: What Is AWS EC2? Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
What Is Amazon ECS?
Amazon ECS is a container management service that was introduced by AWS in 2014 as a simplified way to address the complexity of container management on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Using Amazon ECS, containers can be easily deployed, individually isolated, and are easy to distribute across multiple endpoints because they’re lightweight.
Amazon allows several interfaces to create, access, and manage its ECS resources, including AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, AWS Copilot, Amazon ECS CLI, and AWS CDK.
Amazon ECS enables developers to deploy and manage scalable applications that run on clusters through application program interface (API) and task definitions.
Developers can use ECS to easily start, manage, and stop the containers in a cluster. Amazon ECS lets them configure containers in task definitions, which can be used to run services or tasks independently.
With the AWS Fargate, ECS supports running tasks or services on serverless infrastructure. Amazon ECS customers can deploy and manage containerized applications on any of their managed instances without manually installing, operating, and managing container orchestration software on premises.
Read more: Cloud Security for Virtual Machines & Containers
What Is Amazon ECS Used for?
Amazon ECS can enable AWS Batch to farm out tasks across containers. The Amazon ECS is useful for several applications and areas, including microservices, websites, video rendering services, machine learning, and so on.
- Container-based microservices change the way DevOps tests and deploys applications or services. Amazon ECS makes it simple to deploy microservices and enable service discovery, providing an easy and safe way to update and deploy any service without impacting other services.
- Container-based applications in the cloud or on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere provide consistent tooling, workload scheduling, management, and monitoring across environments.
- Amazon ECS is used in multiple availability zones to automatically scale and run web applications with the performance, reliability, scale, and availability of AWS.
- Amazon ECS is also used to support batch processing, planning, and scheduling across AWS’s full range of services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, and Fargate.
What Are the Benefits of Amazon ECS?
Amazon ECS helps system administrators and managers through automated deployment and rollback solutions, simplifying disaster recovery and on-demand scalability. It is beneficial for several reasons.
- It is cost-efficient to schedule several containers on the same node.
- Amazon ECS is easy to set up for applications and simple for development teams to use. It is highly scalable without requiring management of cluster masters.
- ECS provides visibility and control of AWS resources, smoothly integrating with other AWS services, such as Load Balancers, IAM, and VPCs.
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) integrates with Amazon ECS, which helps to even out workloads across multiple working environments, improve overall compatibility, and provide security.
- Amazon ECS offers developers an overall solution to run a variety of containerized applications and services. Further, users can easily handle platform-related issues and migrate applications.
Read more on TechRepublic: Amazon Web Services (AWS): A Cheat Sheet
Amazon ECS Features
Amazon ECS has powerful features that enable developers to grow from a single Docker container to managing the entire enterprise application portfolio. Docker containers allow developers to package applications as local containers and deploy them without any configuration change. Its features make Amazon ECS a more effective solution.
Serverless With AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate enables teams to concentrate on more important tasks with scaling and infrastructure management control. With Amazon ECS, developers no longer worry about server management, capacity planning, or container workload security.
Amazon ECS Anywhere
Amazon ECS Anywhere enables developers to easily run and manage workloads for container-based applications on customer-managed infrastructures. ECS Anywhere helps developers scale business and meet compliance requirements without sacrificing on-premises investments.
Security and Isolation
Amazon ECS integrates with Identity, Security, and Management, which supports fast developer production cycles. For each container, developers can assign permissions, providing them a high level of isolation when building out applications.
Control Plane Operations
Amazon ECS includes AWS configuration and built-in operational best practices, as well as an autonomous control plane, add-ons, or nodes. Such tools make it easier for teams to focus on application development without the complexity of managing a control plane or nodes.
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