Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Azure Container Instances: What are the differences?

1. Cost model: Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) and Azure Container Instances (ACI) have different pricing models. ECS supports on-demand and spot instances, where you pay based on the number of instances and their sizes. In contrast, ACI follows a per-second billing model, where you pay only for the actual container usage duration.
2. Container orchestration: ECS is tightly integrated with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products, such as Elastic Load Balancer and Identity and Access Management, making it suitable for deploying large-scale containerized applications. On the other hand, ACI is a lightweight container solution that does not provide native support for container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.
3. Scaling capabilities: ECS allows scaling at various levels, from manual scaling to fully automated scaling using AWS Auto Scaling. It also provides integration with AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and scaling based on custom metrics. ACI, however, lacks automatic scaling and requires manual intervention for scaling container instances.
4. Networking capabilities: ECS offers flexible networking options, such as its own virtual private cloud (VPC), dynamic port mapping, and integration with AWS networking services. ACI, in comparison, offers limited networking capabilities, with support for only one public or private IP address per container instance.
5. Service discovery: ECS supports service discovery through its own built-in service discovery mechanism or integration with third-party service discovery systems like Consul. ACI, on the other hand, does not provide native service discovery capabilities, requiring external tools or custom solutions for service discovery.
6. Container instance management: ECS enables managing container instances through its EC2 Container Registry, allowing you to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. ACI, though it supports container images, lacks a dedicated container registry and relies on external image repositories like Azure Container Registry or Docker Hub.

In Summary, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) and Azure Container Instances (ACI) differ in their cost model, container orchestration capabilities, scaling capabilities, networking capabilities, service discovery options, and container instance management.