What is ECS? Everything You Need to Know

In the modern world of business, things are always changing. Thanks to the rise in technology and several advancements that have taken place over the last two decades, the ability to be competitive in the modern market have never been harder. There are a whole host of reasons as to why this is the case, including simply standing out from the crowd. With the internet being ubiquitous in several aspects of modern society the modern-day consumer has more information and options at their fingertips than ever before.

Finding ways of staying competitive, noticed, and reliable while maintaining the ability to scale is no small feat to accomplish. In the digital age, there have been so many wonderful advancements that have opened up entirely new fields of commerce, and new ways of interacting with customers. However, one of the biggest challenges of the digital age will always be leveraging time to be successful. Put simply, most of the complexities of modern technology when it comes to software development, app deployment, and data analytics take up a significant amount of time and manpower. Finding tools that can leverage these tasks is crucial.

Orchestration tools within the digital world are one of the most powerful ways that developers and teams can mitigate tedious workloads and leverage their time wisely for success. One of the best orchestration tools for software developers to use when launching apps is a container. Containerization has become one of the most fundamental tools for businesses to use that want to maintain their competitive edge, grow in innovation, and leverage their time wisely. 

While containerization is one of the best ways of orchestrating app maintenance, there are still questions that businesses have when it comes to utilizing them. Namely, the different choices that are on the market. Two of the most well-known containers on the market are Amazon’s ECS, and Kubernetes.  In fact, it’s not uncommon for developers to often times come down to these two choices and explore the difference in ECS vs Kubernetes. 

If you have been wondering what Amazon’s ECS is and what it brings to the table, here is everything you need to know. 

What Exactly is Amazon’s ECS?

Amazon’s ECS stands for Elastic Container Service and is the tech giant’s very own container orchestration service. With AWS, Amazon Web Service, being one of the largest cloud platforms for developers in the entire world, it makes sense that this juggernaut company would also develop its own in-house container orchestration tool for developers as well.

Amazon ECS is a fully managed service and helps developers deploy, manage and scale their containerized applications with a sense of ease. It has a somewhat easy learning curve and is designed to have a broad appeal to a plethora of different developers. Focusing on accelerated development, high-performance scalability, and minimal management, this is a great tool for any sized company that wants to stay competitive and needs a dependable container orchestration tool. 

Seven Components of ECS

This containerization tool has some major advantages, including being able to seamlessly support other AWS services. This allows for clients who are invested in AWS to have an ease of integration between the AWS components they invest in and their container applications. The container itself comes with seven components:

• Clusters
• Container Instances
• Container Agent
• Task Definition 
• Scheduler 
• Services 

These seven components make up the ECS that developers can use. The cluster refers to a group of container instances that can act in unison, resulting in a single computing resource. The container instances are actually part of EC2, which is a cluster, that can be registered to specified clusters. The container agent is used to register EC2 to specific clusters, and the task definition helps to run docker images for your application. The scheduler is a large part of the orchestration component, running one-off tasks in your cluster when it’s most optimal, and lastly, the services refer to its ability to manage long-running tasks. 

How Much Does ECS Cost?

While an orchestration tool can provide invaluable help to a developer and a team, they don’t come for free. Amazon ECS adopts a pay-as-you-use model of the cost that charges you for what you use. This is similar to the AWS payment, which only costs a company what it actually uses. This is the same concept as utilities that can be monitored for usage which is why developing tools to help teams understand how much of the ECS they are using is important. 

Conclusion 

Amazon ECS is a great containerization orchestration tool for software developers, especially ones that are already invested in AWS. Finding ways of forecasting your costs when using ECS is important, especially when running applications in the cloud. While this is an incredible tool, in order to scale responsibly and grow, you need to be able to budget accordingly as you will be charged for what you use.