Containers are a big deal in development. This is an excellent tool for coding but can be a bit of a challenge once we get to deployment. Never fear, Amazon and their AWS offerings have thought about that and provided a solution. This is where the elastic container service comes into play. Instead of creating a virtual system that you can place containers on, this allows you to directly deliver your containers without all of the sizing issues.
Pricing and Usage
If I have a complaint about Amazon, it is that the pricing can be a bit tricky to figure out. Of course, you always have the option of running a service for days or weeks to get a good feel for your average usage. The elastic container service is one of the more difficult ones to price. It is highly flexible, but that is where the complications begin.
The Fargate service provides a “don’t worry about the specifics” way to launch containers. This makes it easy to spin up and load balance some containers quickly. However, the related costs are not obvious nor are they straightforward to compute. If you would rather have a little more control over pricing, you can set some limits within the billing menu or utilize EC2 for your Docker containers.
Ease of Use
If you are looking at deploying containers, then this is worth a look. You define your service, the actions, and can spring up container instances quickly. This also allows load balancing and dynamic resizing through Fargate and other Amazon services. The back-end administration headaches can all go away if you utilize this service.
This offering from Amazon is one that makes use of several others and shows the power of choosing AWS as a platform for your development and deployment. Check out the tutorials and videos to help you see how your container management tasks can be simplified and automated.
