Maximise the benefits of deploying serverless applications in a container environment with Amazon ECS.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage and scale containerised applications.
How can Amazon ECS work for you?
Batch processing
Plan, schedule, and execute batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Fargate, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.
Hybrid deployment
Build container-based applications on-premises or in the cloud with Amazon ECS Anywhere and enjoy consistent tooling, management, workload scheduling, and monitoring across environments.
Web applications
Automatically scale and run web applications in multiple Availability Zones with the performance, scale, reliability, and availability of AWS.
Long-running workloads
Manage long-running applications and services with Amazon ECS service scheduler. The service scheduler ensures that the specific scheduling strategy is followed and reschedules tasks when a task fails.
Concurrency and scaling
ECS supports bursts of high throughput. ECS on Fargate can handle multiple concurrent requests per container, with no built-in limits. This allows it to scale more efficiently than other serverless offerings like AWS Lambda or AWS App Runner.
Reduced running costs and an end to firefighting
Running advanced container workloads at scale can be a serious operational burden. Our approach to containers on ECS gives you scalability, high availability and fault tolerance without unnecessary complexity.
Benefits
Why choose Amazon ECS?
- Simplicity – ECS runs your containers on a cluster of Amazon EC2, making it easier to build applications with containers by eliminating the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure.
- Scalability – Increase or decrease the capacity of ECS container tasks with Amazon ECS service auto-scaling. Automatic scaling is the ability to increase or decrease the desired count of tasks in your Amazon ECS service automatically.
- Cost Efficiency – A free-to-use service, with Amazon ECS you only pay for the underlying resources your containers use. Save up to 50% on compute costs with autonomous provisioning, auto-scaling, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Integration – Not only is Amazon ECS deeply integrated with other AWS services and features, but it can also be integrated with your schedulers with simple APIs or connected with your existing software delivery process.
ECS Cost Optimisation
Amazon ECS is a free-to-use service however resources used by your containers can rack up significant costs if not architected properly.
fourTheorem can optimise resource usage and reduce your ECS costs by leveraging the following:
- EC2 Spot Instances – Allow you to use excess compute capacity in the AWS cloud (unused Ec2 instances) at a 90% discount from on-demand instances.
- Fargate Spot – Similar to EC2 spot instances, ECS runs on Fargate Spot, letting you save up to 70% of the regular on-demand price.
- ECS Autoscaling – Automatically increases or decreases the capacity for ECS containers. Ensuring that services are not scaling up and down unnecessarily will help save costs.
- Tagging ECS elements – Use tags to categorise your Amazon ECS resources, this will allow you to identify orphaned or underutilised resources and analyse the cost and usage of each
- Multiple load balancer target groups – This feature allows you to attach one ECS service to multiple target groups and cut costs by consolidating services.
AWS Bites Podcast
How do you save cost with ECS?
Learn to save money using Arm (Graviton) instances, Spot instances, Compute Savings Plans, and RIs or EC2 Saving Plans. Discover how to set up Spot instances with capacity providers and specify a capacity provider strategy. And explore our recommended tools that can help you find other opportunities to save on container costs.
