Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
- What it is
- AWS’s own container orchestration service: schedules, runs, scales, and heals containers.
- Deeply integrated with IAM, ALB, CloudWatch, and VPC out of the box.
- Two launch types (the key exam distinction)
- EC2 launch type — containers run on EC2 instances you own and patch. You pay for the instances.
- AWS Fargate launch type — serverless. No instances to manage. You pay per vCPU/GB the task consumes.
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) — runs open-source Kubernetes. Portable, but more operational complexity and a per-cluster hourly charge. ECS is AWS-proprietary and simpler.
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) — the image store ECS pulls from.
- Exam signal
- “Simplest AWS-native container orchestration” → ECS. “Already using Kubernetes / need portability” → EKS.