The Amazon  EC2 container service (ECS) is one of the more advanced, developer focused solutions that Amazon has created for its cloud platform. It is native technology at its finest.

This container management service allows you to easily run your cloud applications, batch jobs, and workloads in a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. ECS is an ideal solution to get up and running with containers fast, as there is no need to install and maintain additional software like Kubernetes.

And best of all, the ECS service ties in with other AWS services for easy and minimal effort development, testing, and rollout of your cloud environments on the Amazon cloud. The sheer power on offer here is unmatched in its simplicity.

Container management does not come more streamlined than this!

Let’s see how the Amazon ECS service works, and what distinct advantages it brings to the table.

How does the Amazon ECS service work?

The very core of the Amazon ECS service is its integration with the overall cloud platform. It is designed to manage clusters of any size and scale, and is highly extensible, in how it can work with custom schedulers. Throw in support for Docker, and you are playing with powers.

Here are some of the highlights of the Amazon EC2 Container Service:

Effortless management

The Amazon EC2 Container Service eliminates the need to operate cluster management software, or design cluster architectures. That is all done for you, so that you can focus on building applications that make use of the Docker technology, without the need to install or manage additional apps.

Integration with AWS services

This is a big one. Amazon ECS plays nicely with other AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud, IAM and CloudTrail. You get the complete package, with familiar solutions for running all kinds of containerized applications or services.

Scalability

In line with other AWS cloud services, Amazon ECS lets you develop at any scale. You can start with a single container, and scale up your applications, batch jobs, and microservices across hundreds of instances, without any additional complexity.

Security

Amazon ECS launches your containers on your own EC2 instances. You get dedicated compute resources that are not shared with other customers. And you can easily define security groups and network ACLs to enable high level of isolation for intensely reliable and highly secure applications.

Peak performance

Amazon has designed the ECS technology, using years of experience of running highly scalable services. Whether you want to run a single Docker container or thousand, you can be up and running in seconds, with no complexity, and utmost performance.

Easy configuration

AWS currently allow two ways to create an ECS cluster, either via the graphical interface of the AWS panel for ECS, or the ECS CLI tool. Either choice gives you the same result, though the latter option helps a bit with the process of configuring a bunch of clusters by yourself.

Familiarize yourself with the Amazon ECS service here.