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ECS always felt rushed to me. The semantics of day-to-day operations always felt really awkward. Common things like rolling updates were a 3-step operation (or

ECS always felt rushed to me. The semantics of day-to-day operations always felt really awkward. Common things like rolling updates were a 3-step operation (or they were for us), and node replacement was a pain. It could be that we were using it wrong, but I never felt motivated to find out the right way. Kubernetes came along, I played with it briefly, and never wanted to go back. I think ECS will, and should, be retired. It was a lurch in the right general direction, but ultimately missed the mark.

zenlikethat 9y ago
It WAS rushed. Amazon has customers banging on their door demanding container support in 2014 and they got ECS out the door, fast. Now it’s 2017 and Kubernetes seems to be the winner of the “orchestration wars” so they’re pivoting to that. Smart move of them to ship something and patch it up later if needed, they successfully defended against GKE’s assault and are vying to stay on top.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > Smart move of them to ship something and patch it up later if needed, they successfully defended against GKE’s assault and are vying to stay on top. If you had to release a product to support the open source front runner, you did not successfully defend against it; you conceded after your tooling adoption failed. As long as Kubernetes leads the way, lock in at any cloud provider is prevented (can even move back on-prem when the winds shift again). Kudos to Google for enabling that, but they have their own motives (ie disrupting AWS uptake).
  - zenlikethat 9y ago
    Kubernetes wasn't the front runner when ECS was released. Nobody knew what would happen. There was a distinct chance ECS could own everything, or Mesos, or Docker’s orchestration, or something else altogether.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    >As long as Kubernetes leads the way, lock in at any cloud provider is prevented That might be a little strong. They still have lots of other proprietary offerings you might use along with K8S. Cloudwatch, various database services, Lambda, SQS, S3, etc.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Don’t rely on primitives without open alternatives unless you want to be chained to your vendor. Today it’s roasting Oracle during the keynote, tomorrow it’ll be today’s “underdog”. It’s easy to talk customer success when the money firehose flows. MariaDB and PostgreSQL both work well outside of RDS.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        I suppose, but there's some stuff that's just hard to avoid. Like tooling to break down cloud costs, or network configuration, monitoring, provisioning block storage, etc. You can get to less lock-in, but it's hard to get to none. Last I saw, "pets" like databases, were not optimal in K8S either. You can make it work, but it's higher effort.
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        I agree that more work is required on the K8S front. Vendor lock-in is a risk to insure against IMHO. Disclaimer: I’m in risk management
sickmate 9y ago
>Common things like rolling updates were a 3-step operation (or they were for us), and node replacement was a pain I had the same experience until I created an ECS stack using CloudFormation, which made it much easier to manage.
wearer_of_hats 9y ago
Considering that Fargate, also announced today, is essentially managed ECS, I don't think it's likely that ECS is going away any time soon. Fargate seems like a pretty substantial investment.

zenlikethat 9y ago

It WAS rushed. Amazon has customers banging on their door demanding container support in 2014 and they got ECS out the door, fast. Now it’s 2017 and Kubernetes seems to be the winner of the “orchestration wars” so they’re pivoting to that. Smart move of them to ship something and patch it up later if needed, they successfully defended against GKE’s assault and are vying to stay on top.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> Smart move of them to ship something and patch it up later if needed, they successfully defended against GKE’s assault and are vying to stay on top. If you had to release a product to support the open source front runner, you did not successfully defend against it; you conceded after your tooling adoption failed. As long as Kubernetes leads the way, lock in at any cloud provider is prevented (can even move back on-prem when the winds shift again). Kudos to Google for enabling that, but they have their own motives (ie disrupting AWS uptake).
- zenlikethat 9y ago
  Kubernetes wasn't the front runner when ECS was released. Nobody knew what would happen. There was a distinct chance ECS could own everything, or Mesos, or Docker’s orchestration, or something else altogether.
- tyingq 9y ago
  >As long as Kubernetes leads the way, lock in at any cloud provider is prevented That might be a little strong. They still have lots of other proprietary offerings you might use along with K8S. Cloudwatch, various database services, Lambda, SQS, S3, etc.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Don’t rely on primitives without open alternatives unless you want to be chained to your vendor. Today it’s roasting Oracle during the keynote, tomorrow it’ll be today’s “underdog”. It’s easy to talk customer success when the money firehose flows. MariaDB and PostgreSQL both work well outside of RDS.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      I suppose, but there's some stuff that's just hard to avoid. Like tooling to break down cloud costs, or network configuration, monitoring, provisioning block storage, etc. You can get to less lock-in, but it's hard to get to none. Last I saw, "pets" like databases, were not optimal in K8S either. You can make it work, but it's higher effort.
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        I agree that more work is required on the K8S front. Vendor lock-in is a risk to insure against IMHO. Disclaimer: I’m in risk management

sickmate 9y ago

>Common things like rolling updates were a 3-step operation (or they were for us), and node replacement was a pain I had the same experience until I created an ECS stack using CloudFormation, which made it much easier to manage.

wearer_of_hats 9y ago

Considering that Fargate, also announced today, is essentially managed ECS, I don't think it's likely that ECS is going away any time soon. Fargate seems like a pretty substantial investment.