Amazon Elastic Container Service Reviews

The solution helps streamline the entire process for the development and production environments.

I use the tool to manage containerized applications. What I like about Amazon ECS is the interface it provides. Although the configurations can be extensive, such as setting up auto-scaling groups and configuring separate tasks and services for each application, the interface makes it manageable.

We are a small team. I'm the only one handling cloud deployments. We're talking about around 20 to 30 people, not more than a hundred.

I've contacted Amazon for this product, mainly for troubleshooting issues. However, I haven't reached out to them for anything else. The company's founder handles negotiations for pricing and other matters, so I'm not involved in that aspect.

Positive

The solution's deployment is easy since the steps are given in the documentation. I rate it an eight out of ten. It can be completed in a day. 

The tool initially required a significant amount of development time on the backend, but in terms of efficiency, it's a one-time effort. Once set up, it can be used for a long time, and maintenance doesn't require much effort. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use Amazon Elastic Container Service to run containers.

Amazon Elastic Container Service serves the function it's supposed to serve.

The solution's user experience and management are really bad.

Amazon Elastic Container Service is not a user-friendly solution. The process of creating everything in Amazon Elastic Container Service is messy. Everything sits in very different locations, and it's not centralized. For example, their networking sits under EC2. You also need to manage the DNS records, which sit under Route 53.

The deployment configuration is located in one place, and the actual EC2 is located in a different place. You have a lot of components to manage, and every one of them is located in a different place, which makes it disorganized.

I have been using Amazon Elastic Container Service for two years.

We never had any issues with the solution's stability, and all the stability issues were user mistakes. When it's that complex, you can make a lot of mistakes. Amazon is doing what they're promising. I can rate the solution a ten out of ten for stability, but the problem is that it's complex. So, you have downtime because of user mistakes.

Amazon Elastic Container Service is a scalable solution. Five people are working with Amazon Elastic Container Service directly, but all our clients are using it.

The solution's initial setup is difficult because you need to be aware of different components in different places.

Amazon Elastic Container Service has a decent price, which is neither cheap nor expensive.

Our company chose Amazon Elastic Container Service because they didn't have the skill set to work with Kubernetes before I joined.

Overall, I rate Amazon Elastic Container Service a six out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The product enables users to easily run and manage containers on scalable infrastructure.

Amazon ECS allows users to deploy and manage container applications like microservices or web applications on Amazon clusters. It's easy to install and designed for AWS targets, serving as a serverless container platform. It offers features such as automatic scanning, load balancing, and service discovery to help users manage their container applications.

Amazon ECS comprises components like task definition, which acts as a blueprint for applications, specifying details like the Docker image, CPU, and memory resources. Containers are lightweight, portable executable packages containing everything needed to run an application or service. It defines how containers should be managed, ensuring the desired number of tasks are running and automatically scaling based on demand.

The best thing about Amazon ECS is that it's a fully managed service. It offers scalability, high availability, cost-effective flexibility, and integration with other AWS services. Additionally, it provides some security features.

We noticed a problem where our container doesn't always run, and the traffic in our secured license exceeds 100%, leading to increased container costs. We are working to understand and reduce this traffic to control costs.

I have been working with the product for two years. 

Amazon ECS is used by seven users in my company. 

My company uses GKE and Amazon ECS. We chose the product as per client requirements. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

Amazon ECS is expensive. 

In our company, the process for creating Amazon ECS services involves having a repository in it. If there's a need to edit variables or resources, we pull the repository to our local terminal, make the necessary edits, and push the changes back to the repository. Subsequently, we deploy using Jenkins. You can easily define the number of containers running in your cluster and manage them. Autoscaling and load balancing are handled automatically by AWS. 

We create clusters, which are logical groups of container systems where tasks can be placed. We can create clusters using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs. During the setup, we decide whether to use an ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image for launching instances or create a launch configuration for an autoscaling group.

I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I use Amazon EC2 Container Service to install system instances that need a container. I rely on it when I use microservices. 

I like the tool's availability and automated scalability. I need to define the port numbers, and when I have a large load of requests, I can get automated scalability. 

Amazon EC2 Container Service is easy to create and manage. I can use it easily on my CI/CD pipeline and deploy solutions. 

The product should improve its price. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

I rate Amazon EC2 Container Service's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. It saves time for my support and development teams. 

Amazon EC2 Container Service is a trustworthy infrastructure from Amazon. It speeds up delivery from the infrastructure and development teams. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We had a client who needed us to develop a simple application. The client specified the requirement for the application to be hosted on Amazon, leading us to utilize Amazon EC2 Container Service for this purpose.

We primarily employ the Linux platform in terms of architecture. It utilizes its database, MySQL. Additionally, for CI/CD processes, we rely on Amazon CodeBuild. Furthermore, we use Amazon S3 storage to store specific static files. Currently, the system is running smoothly, and we don't actively perform any maintenance tasks as everything is automated.

I would like the product to improve integration with different platforms.

I have been using the product since 2020.

The solution is stable. We did not encounter any downtime.

My company has around five users for the product. The solution is utilized by a government agency, serving as a procurement monitoring system for government projects, particularly in infrastructure development. The focus is primarily on road construction and building facilities for the government agency. It is scalable as it's easy to add additional resources or increase capacity. We can easily scale horizontally or vertically, and it comes with its load-balancing capability. This makes it straightforward to manage an increased volume of transactions. Our team is relatively small, consisting of about five to six members. Additionally, the client has an equivalent counterpart that provides operational support. On the operational side, the head office has a well-structured organizational setup, with individuals supporting operations and maintaining the data. In terms of technical aspects, there's also a counterpart responsible for monitoring the performance of the application and the platform on the client side.

AWS' technical support is very helpful.

The tool’s deployment is straightforward. We need to spin up the instance, select the platform, and choose the type of specific computer resources. The developers use Git, compress the file, and configure the pipeline to deploy the compressed application file. Additionally, they utilize a desktop button that automates the uploaded application's deployment on the EC2 instance.

Our technical team did the deployment using Bitbucket pipeline.

Amazon EC2 Container Service is cheap.

The organizational structure consists of a head office and regional offices. Each regional office has a designated point person responsible for user support in their respective region and division. Our primary scope involves the development of the application, deployment, and providing training. I rate the solution a ten out of ten. In our case, the requirements are straightforward. The console offers all the necessary information for basic operations. However, for those new to using the AWS tool, it's advisable to visit their training website to read and understand the instructions on how to set up and use the tool effectively. The basic setup is covered in the training resources.

We have hosted 50 websites using Amazon Elastic Container Service. The websites are used by our end customers and internal employees as well.

ECS is a useful platform.

The orchestration of the workloads running in ECS needs improvement. Additionally, they should automate the auto-scaling features for containers.

We have been using Amazon Elastic Container Service since 2019.

I rate the product’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability an eight out of ten.

In the beginning, when it was a new service, there was not a lot of documentation and online support available. So, we regularly contacted the product’s technical support and development team.

ECS’s initial setup process is complex as we have to follow many manual steps. I rate the process a seven out of ten. It takes a few minutes to a few hours to complete.

The platform is inexpensive.

I rate Amazon Elastic Container Service a seven out of ten. I advise others to use AWS EKS than ECS.

We use the solution for a web application like an e-commerce or a basic site. I have a business site.

EC2 is an initial level with a nominal cost. As a customer, we need to approach an EC2 tool. Additionally, other instances are available at slightly higher costs. Hence, once the business is established and running smoothly, we can upgrade to another instance.

We use the EC2 for testing purposes or as a starting point.

We need RAM, CPU, and install cPanel. cPanel is a separate third-party tool. If we install an EC2 tool, it would be an interface for managing files and databases, making it easier to maintain them.

I have been using Amazon EC2 Container Service as a customer and a partner for two to three years.

The product is stable. We need to skip the unnecessary servers or sometimes enable the autoscaling group feature to adjust based on conditions automatically.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight-point five out of ten.

We can increase the RAM, CPU, and hard disk for scalability.

We have used different hosting from different companies.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution's pricing is nominal. Also, it manages all the servers, mainly when certain servers might experience slowdowns. Amazon EC2 offers features that don't affect the website or application's performance.

If a customer requires a low-cost server, we suggest considering different options from various companies. Otherwise, we recommend exploring the offerings provided by Amazon EC2.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I am using AWS ECS combined with AWS Fargate in order to orchestrate our containers. To explain what that means, I will give an example. Suppose you are running a microservices architecture in which you have multiple containers within multiple services. ECS is the tool that helps you orchestrate all of that, by providing you with the ability to scale up / down your containers and monitor them. Also, with ECS, you can identify any problems or bugs with your containers.

We had a microservices architecture operating in this manner, and we needed some kind of solution to help us manage and orchestrate all our containers. Here we had a choice between something like Kubernetes or ECS, and we chose to use ECS because we didn't have a very large or complex architecture with many containers. Instead, we only have a few containers, yet they still needed orchestration in many ways, which ECS was able to provide.

For me, the best feature of ECS is Fargate because I don't have to manage anything. Instead, everything is managed by AWS and all I have to do, in essence, is configure my containers and deploy them.

That said, whether this feature is appropriate for everyone depends on the sensitivity of your data. I was able to make good use of Fargate since I do not have especially sensitive data running on the containers.

Visualization is an important factor for me, and I don't think that the visuals within ECS are good enough because it doesn't show you all the details you might need to see at a glance.

Another aspect that could be improved is that our monitoring within ECS depends on other services like CloudWatch, for example, and with this arrangement you have to constantly switch between screens when navigating around. Because of this, it's difficult to take a look at your monitoring data, or even just to set up, and it can be very frustrating.

Perhaps it would be possible to improve this situation by having the ability to include everything on one status page. For example, if there is a service or container that is exhibiting a bug or is in some type of loopback mode, when I click on it, I could be shown the screen with all the errors displayed right there.

I didn't see any issues, especially in regards to ECS with Fargate. There are two ways you can run ECS; one way is with EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) and the other is Fargate. When you run ECS with EC2, it means that you manage your own servers and your own containers. However, with Fargate, AWS manages all the servers and containers behind the account. For some people, it might be the case that when you're using ECS with EC2, your issues are more related to your own management methods rather than anything to do with AWS itself.

I contacted support one time when I needed to find some information related to launching containers. I wanted to find out how to access certain container data, such as container ID and so on. Once I reached their support, they managed to help me find this information.

The quality of support you receive depends on your subscription because when you have an enterprise subscription, their response is very quick. However, when you are not part of an enterprise, they might not help you right away. Regardless, when we're talking about how well they help, they are indeed able to offer technical solutions and they are straightforward about it. 

Positive

The setup is not that hard. When I began using it, I found that it's not very intuitive, but at the same time it's not difficult.

I would suggest, however, that AWS offer more courses or tutorials on how to use it. I know that they teach how to use ECS through their certifications, but even a few two to three minute tutorials on their YouTube channel would help people a lot. Personally, I had to look through many resources to find good knowledge on it, but when you eventually find the solution, it gets more intuitive. 

When it comes to how long it takes to deploy your containers within ECS or their orchestration tools, this really depends on your architecture, and how you have set things up. If you have set everything up properly, it takes only a matter of minutes to have your application up and running.

I don't know the exact amount we were charged for our use of ECS, but I do know that it can be costly, especially when there is a bug or an error caused by default configurations. When you configure your containers to be launched with special configurations, such as with CloudWatch events, sometimes they fail to launch and they enter into a locked state. Each time this happens, all the configuration behind the container creates itself again, making it such that the costs can quickly go up if you have any bugs in your configuration.

Besides that issue, I would say it's not that expensive, but can still be costly in a way.

We considered using Kubernetes instead of ECS, but we went with ECS because our architecture and amount of containers did not warrant the complexity of using Kubernetes.

My advice, first of all, is to do your research, and do it in detail. Verify that ECS really satisfies all your requirements, especially when you are also using Fargate because with Fargate you are not managing the servers yourself. A good tip is to watch some tutorials that already exist online, so you can start your process with that.

To be honest, using a tool like Kubernetes to orchestrate your containers can be a very difficult process, especially when setting up Kubernetes clusters, and there are a lot of small things that you need to do and understand. However, compared to Kubernetes, ECS is very intuitive and extremely quick to learn. This is why I would definitely recommend ECS over Kubernetes if you don't have a highly complex microservices architecture and you simply need to set up your containers quickly.

I would recommend ECS mainly for its stability and its ease-of-use in helping to manage containers, despite that there are some improvements that they could make, such as better visualization and other improvements to the technology itself in order to orchestrate even more complex architecture.

Overall, I would rate AWS ECS a six out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)