StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Virtual Machine Management
  5. Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Vagrant

Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Vagrant

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vagrant
Vagrant
Stacks11.9K
Followers7.8K
Votes1.5K
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Stacks14.6K
Followers10.2K
Votes325

Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This comparison highlights key differences between Amazon EC2 Container Service and Vagrant.

1. **Deployment Process**: Amazon EC2 Container Service simplifies the deployment process by managing the underlying infrastructure and container deployment, whereas Vagrant focuses on creating and configuring development environments locally.
2. **Scalability**: Amazon EC2 Container Service offers easy scalability by allowing users to manage clusters of instances, while Vagrant is primarily focused on creating consistent development environments on a single machine.
3. **Integration with Cloud Providers**: EC2 Container Service integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and cloud providers, offering a more comprehensive solution for cloud-based applications, whereas Vagrant may require additional configurations for cloud deployment.
4. **Resource Management**: Amazon EC2 Container Service provides automatic resource management and optimization for containers running on the platform, which may not be as robust in Vagrant environments.
5. **Community Support**: Vagrant has a large community of users and developers constantly contributing plugins and solutions for common use cases, while Amazon EC2 Container Service may have more limited community support in comparison.
6. **Pricing Structure**: The pricing structure of Amazon EC2 Container Service is based on the resources consumed, including instances and containers, while Vagrant is primarily free and open-source, with additional costs for specific plugins or integrations.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon EC2 Container Service and Vagrant lie in the deployment process, scalability, integration with cloud providers, resource management, community support, and pricing structure.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Vagrant, Amazon EC2 Container Service

Andres
Andres

Lead Senior Software Engineer at InTouch Technology

Jun 3, 2020

Decided

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.

91.7k views91.7k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vagrant
Vagrant
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service

Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.

Boxes;Up And SSH;Synced Folders;Provisioning;Networking;Share;Teardown;Rebuild;Providers
Docker Compatibility;Managed Clusters;Programmatic Control;Task Definitions;Scheduler;Docker Repository
Statistics
Stacks
11.9K
Stacks
14.6K
Followers
7.8K
Followers
10.2K
Votes
1.5K
Votes
325
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 352
    Development environments
  • 290
    Simple bootstraping
  • 237
    Free
  • 139
    Boxes
  • 130
    Provisioning
Cons
  • 2
    Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space
  • 2
    Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)
  • 1
    Development environment that kills your battery
Pros
  • 100
    Backed by amazon
  • 72
    Familiar to ec2
  • 53
    Cluster based
  • 42
    Simple API
  • 26
    Iam roles
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
Joyent Cloud
Joyent Cloud
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
SoftLayer
SoftLayer
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Docker
Docker
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Vagrant, Amazon EC2 Container Service?

boot2docker

boot2docker

boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine

Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machine cluster, scaling your application, and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.

Containerum

Containerum

Containerum is built to aid cluster management, teamwork and resource allocation. Containerum runs on top of any Kubernetes cluster and provides a friendly Web UI for cluster management.

Otto

Otto

Otto automatically builds development environments without any configuration; it can detect your project type and has built-in knowledge of industry-standard tools to setup a development environment that is ready to go. When you're ready to deploy, otto builds and manages an infrastructure, sets up servers, builds, and deploys the application.

libvirt

libvirt

It is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies.

Azure Container Service

Azure Container Service

Azure Container Service optimizes the configuration of popular open source tools and technologies specifically for Azure. You get an open solution that offers portability for both your containers and your application configuration. You select the size, the number of hosts, and choice of orchestrator tools, and Container Service handles everything else.

Docker Cloud

Docker Cloud

Docker Cloud is the best way to deploy and manage Dockerized applications. Docker Cloud makes it easy for new Docker users to manage and deploy the full spectrum of applications, from single container apps to distributed microservices stacks, to any cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Amazon EKS

Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.

Azk

Azk

azk lets developers easily and quickly install and configure development environments on their computers.

instainer

instainer

InstaDocker is a Docker container hosting service which allows run any Docker container on the cloud instantly.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana