Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is AWS's native container orchestration service. It allows you to run and scale containerized applications on AWS without managing the underlying infrastructure (with Fargate) or on your own EC2 instances. ECS integrates deeply with AWS services like ALB, CloudWatch, IAM, and VPC, making it the natural choice for teams already invested in AWS. While Kubernetes (EKS) offers more portability, ECS is simpler to use and often more cost-effective for AWS-centric workloads.
ECS is AWS-native and simpler to use; EKS runs Kubernetes and is more portable. ECS is often cheaper and easier for AWS-centric teams. EKS is better if you need Kubernetes compatibility or multi-cloud portability.
What is the difference between ECS and Fargate?
ECS is the orchestration service. Fargate is a serverless compute engine for ECS (and EKS) that eliminates the need to manage EC2 instances. You can run ECS on Fargate (serverless) or EC2 (self-managed).
How much does ECS cost?
ECS itself is free - you pay for the underlying compute (EC2 instances or Fargate). Fargate pricing is based on vCPU and memory used. EC2 launch type uses standard EC2 pricing.