Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) serve different purposes, even though both are compute services offered by AWS.
What it is:
A virtual machine (VM) service that allows you to run Linux or Windows instances.
You control the OS, networking, storage, and everything else.
Use Case:
Running applications that require full control over the OS.
Hosting traditional web servers, databases, or enterprise applications.
Running applications that are not containerized.
Key Features:
✅ Full control over OS and instance configurations.
✅ Customizable instance types (CPU, memory, storage).
✅ Supports auto-scaling, load balancing, and networking setups.
⚠️ You need to manage software installation, patching, and security.
What it is:
A container orchestration service that allows you to run, manage, and scale Docker containers on AWS.
It removes the need to manage individual EC2 instances for container workloads.
Use Case:
Running microservices or containerized applications.
Deploying scalable, fault-tolerant container workloads.
Reducing server management overhead.
Key Features:
✅ Manages containers instead of full VMs.
✅ Can run on EC2 (ECS on EC2) or Fargate (serverless).
✅ Auto-scaling and load balancing for containerized apps.
⚠️ Requires Docker containers for deployment.
Use EC2 if you need full control over the OS, want to run traditional applications, or need to configure custom environments.
Use ECS if you want to run Docker containers efficiently with less management overhead.
💡 Bonus: ECS can run on EC2 instances or AWS Fargate (which is fully managed, so you don’t even have to worry about EC2 instances). 🚀
Would you like help choosing between them for your specific use case?