Numerous organizations, so far, have been focusing a lot on infrastructure provisioning and management. They optimize the number of resources, machines, and infrastructure surrounding the applications they build. However, they should focus on what they do best—software development. Unless your organization wants to invest heavily in an expensive infrastructure team to do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, you’d be better off concentrating on writing and building quality applications rather than focusing on where and how to run and optimize them.
Serverless offerings come as a reprieve for this problem. Instead of concentrating on how to host your infrastructure to run your applications, you can declare what you want to run, and the serverless offering manages it for you. This has become a boon for small enterprises that do not have the budget to invest heavily in infrastructure and want to get started quickly without wasting too much time standing up and maintaining infrastructure to run applications.
Serverless offerings also offer automatic placement and scaling for container and application workloads. You can spin from 0 to 100 instances in minutes, if not seconds. The best part is that you pay for what you use in some services rather than what you allocate.
This chapter will concentrateon a very popular AWS container management offering called ECS and AWS’s container serverless offering, AWS Fargate. We will then briefly examine offerings from other cloud platforms and, finally, the open source container-based serverless solution known as Knative.
Now, let’s go ahead and look at Amazon ECS.
