ECS with Fargate vs EC2

[deniseddi]

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service.(Docker)
• For our project, ECS works better with Fargate (serveless) or Amazon EC2 instances?
• This task will look into the pros/cons and which one is the most appropriate in our case.

[deniseddi]

ECS with EC2:

• Give us more control over the infrastructure
• We get to choose what kind of scaling policies should be applied, what kind of instances to run, etc.
• we have to scale, monitor, patch and secure the EC2 instances ourselves.
• We need to manage the underlying cluster.
• Comes with higher operational overhead.
• the scaling is not easy.

ECS with Fargate:

• Allows to run Docker containers without having to manage servers or clusters.
• We need to specify the usage memory, CPU requirements, define IAM or networking policies.
• We just have to focus on building and designing an application
• Not well-suited for users who need greater control over their containers.
• Low operational overhead, easier to operate.
• Fargate tasks only support non-persistent storage volumes.
• Lower flexibility in terms of resources available compared to the EC2 launch type.

Fargate equals to minimal maintenance and it is easily scalable. On the downside, Fargate is not designed for persistent data storage. Fargate is generally used for transient workloads and I am assuming our datastore would be something we would want to persist. We can run persistent storage volumes with ECS on EC2.

[deniseddi]

Group decision was made to adopt ECS using the EC2 launch type.