Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) – Docker Container Management

We’re living in a continual modifying technical world, where people are keen to find new technologies that makes them more productive. This hunger of ours, has taken virtualization to an another level, by giving birth to  containers, that can be used as an alternative to OS-level virtualization to run multiple isolated systems on a single host.

At the re:Invent 2014 developer conference in Las Vegas, Amazon announced its first docker centric product: the EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable, high performance container management service to help customers run and manage Dockerized distributed applications on its cloud computing platform.

Undoubtedly, these containers has loads of advantages, though neither of its advantages can overshadow the fact that managing them at times is challenge all together.

With Amazon ECS, you do not have to install cluster management software, purchase and maintain the cluster hardware, or match your hardware inventory to your software needs when you use ECS. Amazon ECS takes care of all those things, you can simply launch instances in a cluster, define some tasks, and start them.

Benefits of EC2 Container Service 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of ECS that Amazon is offering,

• Trouble-free Cluster Managment : Setting up and managing clusters made up of Docker containers isn’t any hardship now. With ECS you can maintain complete information of your cluster, from launching to terminating it.
• Scalable Performance : You can manage thousand of containers, whether you’ve to start or stop thousands of containers, it will merely takes seconds to do so.
• Flexible Scheduling:  Amazon EC2 Container Service schedules containers to help find a balance between your resource needs and availability requirements. Because ECS provides you with access to complete state information, you can also build your own scheduler or adapt an existing open source scheduler to use the service’s APIs.
• AWS Integration : Amazon EC2 Container Service can easily be integrated or extended through simple APIs. Your applications can make use of AWS features such as Elastic IP addresses, resource tags, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Security : ECS launches containers on your own EC2 instances running in Amazon VPC. You can assure security of your containers by using other amazon security features like IAM roles, security groups & Network Access Control List

With this new service, developers can now run containers on EC2 across an automatically managed cluster of instances. The ECS service is available in preview now and developers who want to use it can do so free of charge.

Nikhil Kumar Sharma

Ref : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloud-container-management/