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Yeah, I don't know if it's because ECS was my first container orchestration experience but every time I look at teams trying to do k8s on AWS I think how much e

Yeah, I don't know if it's because ECS was my first container orchestration experience but every time I look at teams trying to do k8s on AWS I think how much easier ECS would be.

015a 4y ago
The complexity difference between bog-standard ECS+Fargate and EKS+Fargate deployments rounds down pretty small. Biggest I've seen: ALB integration, IAM integration, and maybe certificate management. Most of that stuff is out-of-box on ECS, but on EKS you need some extra containers or configuration to watch the K8s API and provision stuff for you (if you want to use it; you can also just go pure-k8s) (edit: just to be clear, they provide all this for you; its not out-of-box, but its easy-to-add-box e.g. [1]). An argument could be made for something like CodeDeploy being better integrated on ECS, but that's more of a "k8s doesn't need CodeDeploy but ECS might" kind of thing. And even then, I wouldn't touch it. An argument could also be made that upgrading ECS clusters is a bit easier, as the cluster itself, uh, doesn't have a "version". But on Fargate, its pretty painless on EKS, and Fargate ECS tasks do have a "platform version" that generally doesn't have to be worried about (version: LATEST), but is nonzero nonetheless. Which is really to say that both ECS and EKS puke complexity, because its AWS, but the volume is pretty similar. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/aws-load-balancer-controller.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/aws-load-ba...
- russellendicott 4y ago
  Agreed. I had the displeasure of doing CodeDeploy to ECS Fargate a few weeks ago for a side project and IMO it was overly complex.
  - 015a 4y ago
    Yup. You can get pretty dang far with just "the task definition is in cloudformation, so update the image in cloudformation and submit the template". For a bit more complexity, add ALB routing weights in, and the case for CodeDeploy is kind of weak. My statement that ECS needs it was probably overzealous; for most situations it doesn't, and if there's some crazy functionality it does I'm not aware of, you'd probably need something else in k8s as well (e.g. istio).

Yeah, I don't know if it's because ECS was my first container orchestration experience but every time I look at teams trying to do k8s on AWS I think how much easier ECS would be.

015a 4y ago

The complexity difference between bog-standard ECS+Fargate and EKS+Fargate deployments rounds down pretty small. Biggest I've seen: ALB integration, IAM integration, and maybe certificate management. Most of that stuff is out-of-box on ECS, but on EKS you need some extra containers or configuration to watch the K8s API and provision stuff for you (if you want to use it; you can also just go pure-k8s) (edit: just to be clear, they provide all this for you; its not out-of-box, but its easy-to-add-box e.g. [1]). An argument could be made for something like CodeDeploy being better integrated on ECS, but that's more of a "k8s doesn't need CodeDeploy but ECS might" kind of thing. And even then, I wouldn't touch it. An argument could also be made that upgrading ECS clusters is a bit easier, as the cluster itself, uh, doesn't have a "version". But on Fargate, its pretty painless on EKS, and Fargate ECS tasks do have a "platform version" that generally doesn't have to be worried about (version: LATEST), but is nonzero nonetheless. Which is really to say that both ECS and EKS puke complexity, because its AWS, but the volume is pretty similar. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/aws-load-balancer-controller.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/aws-load-ba...

russellendicott 4y ago
Agreed. I had the displeasure of doing CodeDeploy to ECS Fargate a few weeks ago for a side project and IMO it was overly complex.
- 015a 4y ago
  Yup. You can get pretty dang far with just "the task definition is in cloudformation, so update the image in cloudformation and submit the template". For a bit more complexity, add ALB routing weights in, and the case for CodeDeploy is kind of weak. My statement that ECS needs it was probably overzealous; for most situations it doesn't, and if there's some crazy functionality it does I'm not aware of, you'd probably need something else in k8s as well (e.g. istio).