Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Orchard

Back in 2018, we were running microservices in the ECS cluster by managing EC2 instances ourselves. It involved lots of toil work.

Without Fargate we had to maintain & monitor a pool of spot instances, choose the right size of instances, keep OS up-to-date, etc.

We want to ship features, not to manage servers. That's why as soon as AWS Fargate was announced, we migrated our microservices to this managed service. The only configuration you need is Docker image, RAM & CPU resources. The rest of the heavy lifting is taken care of by Fargate, which is wonderful.

If you want to integrate your cluster and control end to end your pipeline with AWS tools like ECR and Code Pipeline your best option is ECS using a EC2 instance. There are pros and cons but it's easier to integrate using cloud formation templates and visual UI for approvals, etc. ECS is free, you need to pay only for the EC2 instance but unfortunately, it is not standard then you cannot use standard tools to see and manage your Kubernetes.
EKS in the other hand uses standard Kubernates definitions but you need to pay for the service and also for the EC2 instance(s) you have in your cluster.