Introduction Understand Consider Choose Use Explore

Choosing an AWS container service

Taking the first step

Purpose	Determine which AWS container service is the best fit for your organization.
Last updated	April 5, 2024
Covered services	Amazon EC2 Amazon ECR Amazon ECS Amazon EKS Amazon Lightsail AWS App Runner AWS Batch AWS Copilot AWS Fargate AWS Lambda AWS Outposts Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Introduction

Containers are a key component of modern application development. They are the standard for organizing compute resources, and managing the content of your application deployments.

Containers provide a discrete reproducible compute environment for building software to deploy in the cloud. They also simplify packaging and dependency management. You can use them for everything from orchestrating web applications or very large multi-cluster estates to testing your work and doing a proof of concept on your laptop.

This decision guide helps you get started and choose the right AWS container service for your modern application development.

This 3½-minute excerpt is from an 11-minute presentation at re:Invent 2023 by Umar Saeed, an AWS senior manager and solutions architect. He provides a quick overview of AWS container choices.

Understand

Containers offer a number of advantages for packaging, deploying, and running applications:

Portability: Benefit from a consistent runtime environment that can run on any platform that supports the container runtime.
Scalability: Scale applications up or down, based on demand, with lightweight and easily replicated containers.
Consistency: Ensure that the application runs the same way in all environments with a consistent runtime environment.
Efficiency: Use fewer resources than traditional virtual machines with lightweight containers.
Isolation: Improve security and reliability with containers' process-level isolation, with which applications running in separate containers cannot interfere with each other, improving security and reliability.
Agility: Reduce the time that it takes to bring new features or applications to market by quickly packaging and deploying applications.

Diagram showing the options available for running containers on AWS

You can think about the universe of AWS container services in three distinct layers:

The Compute capacity layer is where your containers actually run. This layer consists of:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances: These instances provide the underlying compute capacity for running containers. You can choose from a wide range of instance types and sizes to match your application requirements. EC2 instances can be used as the compute layer for both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
- AWS Fargate: Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers with which you can run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure. It removes the need to provision and manage EC2 instances. You can use Fargate with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
- AWS Outposts: AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to your on-premises or hybrid environment. With AWS Outposts, you can run containers on AWS infrastructure deployed in your own data center.
The orchestration layer schedules and scales your environment. This layer includes:
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS): Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. It supports Docker containers. You can use Amazon ECS to define tasks and services, handle service discovery, and manage the lifecycle of containers.
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS): Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service with which you can deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes. It provides a highly available and secure Kubernetes control plane.
- Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA): ROSA is a fully managed service with which you can deploy and run Red Hat OpenShift clusters on AWS infrastructure. OpenShift is a popular enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform that extends the capabilities of Kubernetes with additional features and tools for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications.
The Vertical solutions layer is a set of vertical integration services that provide higher-level and bundled services that simplify the process of deploying and managing applications. The AWS services in this layer are:
- AWS App Runner: AWS App Runner is a fully managed service designed to simplify the deployment and use of containerized web applications and APIs. You provide your container image, and App Runner automatically builds, deploys, and scales your application. It handles the provisioning of the underlying compute resources, load balancing, and automatic scaling based on incoming traffic.
- Amazon Lightsail: Amazon Lightsail is a cloud platform that offers pre-configured virtual private servers (instances) and other resources for running applications. It provides pre-defined configurations for quickly provisioning compute instances, databases, storage, and networking resources. Lightsail supports running containerized applications by provisioning instances with Docker pre-installed, aimed at easing the deployment and management of your containers.
- AWS Batch: AWS Batch is a fully managed service with which you can run batch computing workloads on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal compute resources based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs that you submit. It automatically handles job scheduling, resource provisioning, and scaling based on the workload requirements.
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR): Amazon ECR is a fully managed Docker container registry with which you can store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. It is designed to provide secure and scalable storage for your container images and simplify provisioning containers with the desired images.

Note

AWS provides a variety of ways to deploy and run containers. One of the first considerations is your preference for either a serverless operational model or a Kubernetes operation model. In practice, most customers use both to varying degrees.

The choice of operating model is explored in-depth in the Choosing a modern application strategy decision guide, which is a useful resource for anyone who wants to explore this question further. In addition, the Containers and Serverless Recommendation Guide takes you through the choices to make when choosing your operating model.

Consider

It's important to choose a container service that aligns to your application requirements and operational preferences. The following section outlines some of the key criteria to consider when choosing a container service, as well as supporting tools and services.

Managed service and operation overhead

Building with containers on AWS uses services with higher levels of abstraction to shift the operational overhead of maintaining infrastructure to AWS. Organizations may choose the cloud to reduce operational cost by using standardized managed services with higher levels of abstraction so that developers and operators can focus on their unique activities that add value, instead of on undifferentiated tasks.

Workload characteristics

Understanding your workload patterns can help you make architecture choices. Workload patterns can include web applications, API-based microservices, event-driven applications, streaming and messaging, data pipelines, IT automations, and more. Some workloads perform better or are more cost effective in one compute environment versus another type.

Application portability

Many customers want to ensure that their applications can run in—and be migrated or moved to—a different environment. It's important for them to be able to preserve choice, or run an application both on premises and in the cloud.

We recommend building competency in software architectures and build packaging with which you can readily port differentiating business logic between compute services.

Applications built using some technologies might run more effectively on some compute services rather than others.

Organization size and skills

The skills of your organization are a major factor when deciding which container services you use. The approach you take can require some investment in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams. Building out an automated pipeline to deploy applications is common for most modern application development.

Some choices elevate the amount of management you need to do. For example, some organizations have skills and resources to run and manage a Kubernetes implementation, because they invest in strong SRE teams to manage Kubernetes clusters and find value in the associated skill portability. These teams handle frequent cluster upgrades. For example, Kubernetes has three major releases a year, and deprecates old versions.

Organization size is a key factor, as smaller organizations might have a more limited IT team made up of people fulfilling multiple roles, while larger enterprises may support hundreds of workloads in production at once.

Ease of deployment

Different AWS container services meet unique needs in terms of deployment complexity. Here's how each service is optimized for its own role:

AWS App Runner offers the most straightforward path for you to deploy your application on the internet without managing or customizing the underlying infrastructure.
Amazon ECS is a good choice if you need more control over the network and security configurations without sacrificing scale or features.
Amazon EKS provides flexibility and control over application deployment and orchestration provided by Kubernetes technology.

Choose

Now that you know the criteria by which you are evaluating your container options, you are ready to choose which AWS container services might be a good fit for your organizational requirements.

The following table highlights which services are optimized for which circumstances. Use the table to help determine which container services and tools are.

Containers category	When would you use it?	Services
Capacity	Use when you want to run your containers on self-managed AWS virtual machines or AWS managed compute.	AWS Fargate Amazon EC2 AWS Outposts
Orchestration	Use when you need the capacity to deploy and manage up to thousands of containers.	Amazon ECS Amazon EKS Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS
Vertical solutions	Use when you or your team don't have a lot of experience with containers or infrastructure.	AWS App Runner AWS Lambda Amazon Lightsail AWS Batch
Tools and services with container support	Use for supporting your container operations.	AWS Copilot Amazon ECR AWS Cloud Map
On-premises	Use these services for flexibility in where you run your container-based applications.	Amazon ECS Anywhere Amazon EKS Anywhere

Use

You should now have a clear understanding of each AWS container service (and the supporting AWS tools and services) and which one might be the best fit for your organization and use case.

To explore how to use and learn more about each of the available AWS container services, we have provided a pathway to explore how each of the services work. The following section provides links to in-depth documentation, hands-on tutorials, and resources to get you started.

Capacity

Amazon EC2

What is Amazon EC2?

Get an overview of Amazon EC2. This guide not only provides an introduction to the service, but also covers how to get started using it and then provides in-depth descriptions of key features and how to use them.

Explore the guides

Amazon EC2 instance types

When you launch an EC2 instance, the instance type that you specify determines the hardware of the host computer used for your instance. Each instance type offers different compute, memory, and storage capabilities, and is grouped in an instance family based on these capabilities. This guide walks you through EC2 instance types.

Choosing an AWS container service

Introduction

Understand

Note

Consider

Choose

Use

Capacity

Orchestration

Vertical solutions

Tools and services with container support

On-premises

Explore