AWS CloudFormation vs Amazon EC2 Container Service: What are the differences?

Key differences between AWS CloudFormation and Amazon EC2 Container Service

1. Managed Services vs. Container Orchestration: AWS CloudFormation is a managed service that provides infrastructure as code, allowing users to define and provision AWS resources in a predictable and repeatable manner. It focuses on the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources. On the other hand, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a container orchestration service that helps users to run, manage, and scale containerized applications using Docker containers. It focuses on managing the deployment and lifecycle of containerized applications.

2. Granularity of Control: With AWS CloudFormation, users have fine-grained control over the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure resources. It allows users to specify details such as instance types, storage volumes, network settings, and security groups. In contrast, Amazon ECS abstracts the underlying infrastructure and provides a higher-level control over containers. Users define container specifications, such as CPU and memory requirements, and Amazon ECS takes care of the underlying infrastructure provisioning and coordination.

3. Resource Management: AWS CloudFormation manages infrastructure resources as a stack. Users define a template that describes the resources they need, and CloudFormation creates and manages the stack based on that template. It provides features like rolling updates and drift detection. In contrast, Amazon ECS manages containers as tasks and services. Users define tasks that specify container images, networking, and resource requirements. ECS takes care of deploying and scaling those tasks, managing container instances, and load balancing traffic.

4. Integration with Other AWS Services: AWS CloudFormation integrates with various AWS services, enabling users to create and provision resources from different services as part of a stack. Users can define dependencies between resources, enabling efficient provisioning and management. Amazon ECS integrates tightly with other AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for container image storage, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for load balancing container traffic. This integration simplifies the overall deployment and management process.

5. Infrastructure-as-Code vs. Containerization: AWS CloudFormation focuses on defining infrastructure resources as code and managing the infrastructure lifecycle. It enables users to declaratively define and version their infrastructure. Amazon ECS, on the other hand, focuses on containerization and managing the application lifecycle. It provides features like task definitions and service definitions to define and manage containerized applications.

6. Deployment and Management: AWS CloudFormation provides features like change sets, drift detection, and rollback, which enable users to safely deploy and manage changes to their infrastructure. It supports blue-green deployments and other advanced deployment strategies. With Amazon ECS, users can easily update their containerized applications by creating new task definitions and deploying new versions of services. It handles the deployment and management of containers, making it easier to scale and update applications.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation is a managed service for infrastructure provisioning and management, while Amazon EC2 Container Service is a container orchestration service for running and managing containerized applications.