3 months ago
- Containerizing a small team's app often leads to adopting Kubernetes by default, resulting in maintenance overhead and delayed app development.
- ECS is a container orchestrator with fewer moving parts than Kubernetes, offering similar functionality with fewer operational decisions and defaults.
- The core concept of both ECS and Kubernetes involves declaring desired state and using a control loop to enforce it, enabling features like rolling deployments.
- ECS reduces operational burden by eliminating version upgrades, deprecation cycles, and many management layers, making it suitable for small teams.
- Key benefits of ECS include no control plane costs, less engineering time spent on maintenance, and a focus on app debugging over platform issues.
- Drawbacks of ECS include limited operator ecosystem, less tooling support, potential hiring challenges, and a control ceiling for advanced features.
- EKS is recommended for teams with dedicated platform operators, need for stateful infrastructure not offered by AWS, multi-cloud requirements, or existing Kubernetes expertise.
- For small teams (under 10 engineers) shipping web products, ECS minimizes operational complexity, allowing focus on product development rather than infrastructure management.