Amazon ECS provides a versatile way of managing your container workloads. It works great when you have a smaller, simpler architecture and don’t want to add the additional overhead of using a complex container orchestration engine such as Kubernetes.
Tip
ECS is an excellent tool choice if you run exclusively on AWS and don’t have a future multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy. Fargate makes deploying and running your containers easier without worrying about the infrastructure behind the scenes.
ECS is tightly coupled with AWS and its architecture. To solve this problem, we can use managed services within AWS, such as Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It offers the Kubernetes API to schedule your workloads. This makes managing containers even more versatile as you can easily spin up a Kubernetes cluster and use a standard, open source solution that you can install and run anywhere you like. This does not tie you to a particular vendor. However, EKS is slightly more expensive than ECS and adds a $0.10 per hour cluster management charge. That is nothing in comparison to the benefits you get out of it.
If you aren’t running on AWS, there are options from other providers too. The next of the big three cloud providers is Azure, which offers Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a managed Kubernetes solution that can help you get started in minutes. AKS provides a fully managed solution with event-driven elastic provisioning for worker nodes as and when required. It also integrates nicely with Azure DevOps, giving you a faster end- to-end (E2E) development experience. As with AWS, Azure also charges $0.10 per hour for cluster management.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is one of the most robust Kubernetes platforms. Since the Kubernetes project came from Google and is the largest contributor to this project in the open source community, GKE is generally quicker to roll out newer versions and is the first to release security patches into the solution. Also, it is one of the most feature-rich with customizable solutions and offers several plugins as a cluster configuration. Therefore, you can choose what to install on Bootstrap and further harden your cluster. However, all these come at a cost, as GKE charges a $0.10 cluster management charge per hour, just like AWS and Azure.
You can use Google Cloud Run if you don’t want to use Kubernetes if your architecture is not complicated, and there are only a few containers to manage. Google Cloud Run is a serverless CaaS solution built on the open source Knative project. It helps you run your containers without any vendor lock-in. Since it is serverless, you only pay for the number of containers you use and their resource utilization. It is a fully scalable and well-integrated solution with Google Cloud’s DevOps and monitoring solutions such as Cloud Code, Cloud Build, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Logging. The best part is that it is comparable to AWS Fargate and abstracts all infrastructure behind the scenes. So, it’s a minimal Ops or NoOps solution.
Now that we’ve mentioned Knative as an open source CaaS solution, let’s discuss it in more detail.
