AWS EC2 vs ECS vs EKS?

Question

Accepted Answer

**EC2, ECS, and EKS** — three ways to run applications in AWS, from simple to complex.

**Simple analogy:**
- **EC2** — you rent a virtual machine and configure everything yourself.
- **ECS** — AWS manages containers for you, but without Kubernetes.
- **EKS** — full-fledged Kubernetes in AWS.

**EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud):**
- Virtual servers.
- Full OS control.
```bash
aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-xxx --instance-type t3.micro
```

**ECS (Elastic Container Service):**
- Container management (Docker).
- **Fargate** — serverless containers (no server management).
```json
{
  "containerDefinitions": [{
    "name": "web",
    "image": "nginx:latest",
    "portMappings": [{"containerPort": 80}]
  }]
}
```

**EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service):**
- Full-fledged Kubernetes.
- More capabilities (Helm, Operators, CRD).

**Comparison:**
| Criterion | EC2 | ECS | EKS |
|---------|-----|-----|-----|
| Complexity | High | Low | Medium |
| Flexibility | Maximum | Medium | High |
| Cost | More expensive | Cheaper | Medium |
| Scaling | Manual | Auto | Auto |

DevOps: AWS EC2 vs ECS vs EKS?