Containers on AWS How to Choose

Introduction

Containers are a key component of modern app development. They have become the standard way to organize compute resources, and manage the content of your application deployments.

Containers provide a discrete reproducible compute environment. They also provide a way to simplify packaging and dependency management. From the orchestration of very large multi-cluster estates to web applications - or even testing your work and doing a proof of concept on your laptop - they are a great way to get started and build software to deploy in the cloud.

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

This four-minute excerpt is from a 57 minute recording of a presentation by Vikram Venkataraman, a principal technical account manager at AWS, given at AWS Summit DC 2022. It provides an overview of available AWS container services.

Time to read

20 minutes

Purpose

Help determine which AWS container service is the best fit for your organization.

Level

Beginner

Last updated

April 26, 2023

Covered services

Amazon EC2
Amazon ECR
Amazon ECS
Amazon EKS
Amazon Lightsail
AWS App Runner
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Fargate
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

More decision guides about

Analytics
Application integration
Databases
Development strategy
Machine learning
Storage

Understand

Containers have become a de facto standard for packaging application code, configurations, and dependencies into a single artifact, because they can be deployed in a consistent manner to multiple environments.

Containers are a key piece of any modern application development strategy. To provide some context for container-related AWS services, the image on the right shows the available AWS container options by layer (explained more fully in this video).

Capacity

Capacity refers to the underlying compute that you will deploy your container to, your central processing unit (CPU), and memory requirements. Capacity is the infrastructure the container is going to run on. There are two choices for capacity for your containers on AWS:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AmazonEC2) allows you to run your containers on virtual machines that you manage.
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that allows you to run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure. With Fargate, you can launch and scale containers without worrying about the underlying EC2 instances.

Orchestration

It is not uncommon for organizations to be running not one or a few but thousands of containers. It becomes challenging to manage such a complex environment. Orchestration services help facilitate the deployment and management of these applications. AWS offers three orchestration services:

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service and is ideal for organizations that want a simple and cost-effective way to deploy and manage containerized applications.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully-managed Kubernetes service that allows you to run and manage Kubernetes clusters on AWS.
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a fully-managed OpenShift service that allows you to run and manage OpenShift clusters on AWS. It is a good option for customers who are already running OpenShift on premises.

Provisioning

Provisioning provides an interface to the orchestration layer of services. Each orchestrator comes with its own complexities. Provisioning services hide this complexity and helps make it easier for you to consume the service. AWS services in this category include:

AWS App Runner is a fully-managed service that automatically builds container images from your source code, deploys the containers to a fully-managed infrastructure, and scales them based on demand.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale web applications. Elastic Beanstalk also supports containers and provides a fully-managed platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications.
Amazon Lightsail is a simple and cost-effective way to launch and manage virtual private servers, but also offers support for containers, allowing you to create and deploy containerized applications using Lightsail instances.

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 & operation overhead
Workload Characteristics
Application portability
Organization size and skills
Ease of deployment

Organizations may choose the cloud to reduce operational cost by standardizing on managed services that shift the operational burden to AWS. Higher levels of abstraction allow developers and operators to focus on their own unique value-add activities, instead of undifferentiated tasks.

Building with containers on AWS uses services with higher levels of abstraction to shift the operational overhead of maintaining infrastructure to AWS.
You can more easily make architecture choices by understanding your workload patterns. This may include web applications, API-based microservices, event-driven applications, streaming and messaging, data pipelines, IT automations, and more. Some workloads will perform better or be more cost effective in a one compute environment versus another type.
Many customers want to ensure that their applications can run in - and be easily 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 that allows you to more readily port differentiating business logic between compute services.

Applications built using some technologies may run more effectively on some compute services versus others.
The skills of your organization are a major factor when deciding which container services you use. The approach you take will 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. 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. 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 startups might have a small IT staff made up of people fulfilling multiple roles, while larger enterprises may support hundreds of workloads in production at once.
Different AWS container services meet unique needs in terms of deployment complexity. Here's how each service is optimized for its own role:
- AWS AppRunner offers the simplest path, allowing you to deploy your application on the public internet without managing or customizing the underlying infrastructure.
- Amazon ECS is a good choice if you need a little more control over the network and security configurations without sacrificing scale or features.
- Amazon EKS can allow you to use the flexibility and control over application deployment and orchestration provided by Kubernetes technology.

Choose

Now that you know the criteria by which you will be evaluating your container options, you are ready to choose which AWS container service(s) may 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 service is the best fit for your organization and use case.

Containers

When would you use it?

What is it optimized for?

Related container services or tools

Use when you want to run your containers on self-managed AWS virtual machines or AWS managed compute.

Optimized for running your containers on AWS compute.

Use when you need to be able to deploy and manage up to thousands of containers.

Optimized for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications on AWS.

Used when you or your team don't have a lot of experience with containers or infrastructure.

Optimized for ease of use.

Use when you need tools to provide a container registry as well as containerize and migrate existing applications.

Optimized for supporting your container operations.

Use when you need to run a familiar control plane to ensure a consistent experience no matter where your container-based applications are running.

Optimized for flexibility in where you run your container-based applications.

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.

Amazon EC2
Getting started with Amazon EC2

Access the complete set of Amazon EC2 technical documentation, including guides to Linux and Windows instances.

Explore the guides »

VM Import/Export User Guide

Learn how to import virtual machine (VM) images from your existing virtualization environment to Amazon EC2, and then export them back.

Explore the guide »

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with EC2 Spot Instances

Learn how to create a stateless, fault tolerant workload using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with launch templates to request Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.

Get started with the tutorial »

Deploy a Web Application on Amazon EC2

We walk you through creating an Amazon EC2 instance using AWS CDK, and deploying a web application on it.

Explore the guide »
Amazon ECR
What is Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)?

A guide to getting started with - and using - ECR.

Explore the guide »

Amazon ECR in Multi-Account and Multi-Region Architectures

Explore key considerations for Amazon ECR architectures that span across AWS accounts and AWS Regions, and architectures related to hypothetical customer use cases.

Read the blog post »

Getting started with Amazon ECR Public

Start using Amazon ECR public repositories by creating your first public repository and setting your public registry settings in the Amazon ECR console.

Explore the guide »

Create a pipeline with an Amazon ECR source and ECS-to-CodeDeploy deployment

Configure a pipeline in AWS CodePipeline that deploys container applications using a blue/green deployment that supports Docker images.

Get started with the tutorial »
Amazon ECS
Getting started with Amazon ECS

This guide provides an introduction to the tools available to access Amazon ECS and introductory step-by-step procedures to run containers.

Explore the guide »

Tutorials for Amazon ECS

More than a dozen tutorials on how to perform common tasks - including the creation of clusters and VPCs - when using Amazon ECS.

Get started with the tutorials »

What's new and what's next with Amazon ECS

Learn what’s new since the launch of Amazon ECS Anywhere, new features of AWS Fargate, and a look ahead at the exciting enhancements to Amazon ECS.

Get the full story in this video »

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Deployment

This guide offers an overview of Amazon ECS deployment options on AWS and shows how it can be used to manage a simple containerized application.

Explore the guide »

Amazon ECS Workshop

This workshop is designed to educate those that might not be familiar with AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS, and possibly even Docker container workflow.

Explore the workshop »

Deploy Docker Containers on Amazon ECS

Learn how to run a Docker-enabled sample application on an Amazon ECS cluster behind a load balancer, test the sample application, and delete your resources to avoid charges.

Use the tutorial »
Amazon EKS
Getting started with Amazon EKS

Learn more about Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes.

Explore the guide »

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) deployment

Explore Amazon EKS deployment options on AWS and learn how it can be used to manage a general containerized application.

Explore the guide »

Amazon EKS Quick Start Reference Deployment

Using a Quick Start reference deployment guide, we provide step-by-step instructions for deploying Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters.

Explore the guide »

Deploy a Kubernetes Application

This tutorial shows you how to deploy a containerized application onto a Kubernetes cluster managed by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS).

Use the tutorial »

Amazon EKS workshop

Practical exercises to learn about Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

Visit the workshop »
Amazon Lightsail
Creating, pushing, and deploying container images
with Amazon Lightsail

This tutorial shows how how to create a container image on your local machine using a Dockerfile. After your image is created, you can then push it to your Lightsail container service to deploy it.

Get started with the tutorial »

Amazon Lightsail resource center

Explore Lightsail tutorials, videos, and links to core concept documentation.

Visit the resource center »

Launch a Linux Virtual Machine with Amazon Lightsail

In this tutorial, you create an Amazon Linux instance in Amazon Lightsail. After the instance is up and running, you connect to it via SSH within the Lightsail console using the browser-based SSH terminal.

Get started with the tutorial »
AWS App Runner
Getting started with AWS App Runner

This tutorial walks you through configuring the source code and deployment, the service build, and the service runtime to deploy your application to the App Runner service. It also shows how to deploy a code version, make a configuration change, and view logs.

Use the tutorial »

AWS App Runner: From code to a scalable, secure web application in minutes

Explore how AWS App Runner was designed to make it easier for you to deploy web apps and APIs to the cloud, regardless of the language they are written in, even for teams that lack prior experience deploying and managing containers or infrastructure.

Read the blog »

Deploy a web app using AWS App Runner

Follow these step-by-step instructions to deploy a containerized web app using AWS App Runner. Start with your source code or a container image. App Runner automatically builds and deploys the web application and load balances traffic with encryption.

Deploy your web app »
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Getting started using Elastic Beanstalk

This guide walks you through creating, exploring, updating, and deleting an Elastic Beanstalk application.

Explore the guide »

Deployment options on AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This guide explains you can use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy, manage, and scale applications without the operational burden of managing infrastructure.

Explore the guide »

Intermediate AWS Electric Beanstalk tutorials and samples

These tutorials are targeted at intermediate users and may not contain instructions for basic steps such as signing up for AWS.

Get started with the tutorials »
AWS Fargate
Getting started with AWS Fargate

This guide explains the basics of AWS Fargate, a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances.

Explore the guide »

Getting started with the console using Linux containers on AWS Fargate

Get started with Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate by using the Fargate launch type for your tasks in the Regions where Amazon ECS supports AWS Fargate.

Explore the guide »

Creating a cluster with a Fargate Linux task using the AWS CLI

Set up a cluster, register a task definition, run a Linux task, and perform other common scenarios in Amazon ECS with the AWS CLI.

Explore the guide »
ROSA
Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

This guide will help you get started using Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.

Explore the guide »

Why would you use ROSA?

This video looks at when you might use Red Hat OpenShift over standard Kubernetes and explores ROSA on AWS in depth.

Watch the video »