What is Amazon Elastic Container Service?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. As a fully managed service, Amazon ECS comes with AWS configuration and operational best practices built-in. It's integrated with both AWS tools, such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry, and third-party tools, such as Docker. This integration makes it easier for teams to focus on building the applications, not the environment. You can run and scale your container workloads across AWS Regions in the cloud, and on-premises, without the complexity of managing a control plane.

Terminology and components

There are three layers in Amazon ECS:

• Capacity - The infrastructure where your containers run

• Controller - Deploy and manage your applications that run on the containers

• Provisioning - The tools that you can use to interface with the scheduler to deploy and manage your applications and containers

The following diagram shows the Amazon ECS layers.

The capacity is the infrastructure where your containers run. The following is an overview of the capacity options:

• Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS cloud

  You choose the instance type, the number of instances, and manage the capacity.

• Serverless (AWS Fargate) in the AWS cloud

  Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. With Fargate you don't need to manage servers, handle capacity planning, or isolate container workloads for security.

• On-premises virtual machines (VM) or servers

  Amazon ECS Anywhere provides support for registering an external instance such as an on-premises server or virtual machine (VM), to your Amazon ECS cluster.

The Amazon ECS scheduler is the software that manages your applications.

Features

Amazon ECS provides the following high-level features:

Task definition

The blueprint for the application.

Cluster

The infrastructure your application runs on.

Task

An application such as a batch job that performs work, and then stops.

Service

A long running stateless application.

Account Setting

Allows access to features.

Cluster Auto Scaling

Amazon ECS manages the scaling of Amazon EC2 instances that are registered to your cluster.

Service Auto Scaling

Amazon ECS increases or decreases the desired number of tasks in your service automatically.

Provisioning

There are multiple options for provisioning Amazon ECS:

• AWS Management Console — Provides a web interface that you can use to access your Amazon ECS resources.

• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) — Provides commands for a broad set of AWS services, including Amazon ECS. It's supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux. For more information, see AWS Command Line Interface.

• AWS SDKs — Provides language-specific APIs and takes care of many of the connection details. These include calculating signatures, handling request retries, and error handling. For more information, see AWS SDKs.

• AWS CDK — Provides an open-source software development framework that you can use to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. The AWS CDK provisions your resources in a safe, repeatable manner through AWS CloudFormation.

Related services

Services to use with Amazon ECS

You can use other AWS services to help you deploy yours tasks and services on Amazon ECS.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Helps ensure you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application.

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitor your services and tasks.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry

Store and manage container images.

Elastic Load Balancing

Automatically distribute incoming service traffic.

Amazon GuardDuty

Detect potentially unauthorized or malicious use of your container instances and workloads.