2 posts tagged with "containers"

At the end of the last post, I left you with the question ECS keeps asking that Lambda never did.

Whose server is this?

That question has exactly three answers. AWS calls them EC2, Fargate, and — the new kid — Managed Instances. Picking between them feels like the first real fork in your ECS journey, the one where you're sure you'll choose wrong and regret it for eighteen months.

Here's the reassuring part: it's less of a fork than it looks. All three run the exact same container. Same task definition, same image, same application code. The only thing that changes is who owns and babysits the box your container lands on. Get that one idea and the rest is just trade-offs.

You containerized a Lambda function. Then you moved it to AWS Fargate, and it just...worked.

But here's the part I glossed over: Fargate isn't a service you deployed to. It's a launch type. When you ran that task, you had your first encounter with Amazon ECS — and you quietly accepted a bunch of defaults you didn't even know you were choosing.

So what is ECS, really?