Whether you’re new to the cloud, or migrating to AWS, you’re unlikely to venture too far without needing to run containers. Fortunately, all the cloud vendors offer many (too many?) ways to do this, mostly hidden behind a sea of acronyms. Today, we’ll focus on two of the biggest options; Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Azure Container Apps (ACA), as these are quite similar in some ways, but also very different.
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Introducing our Competitors
Amazon ECS
Amazon’s long-standing container orchestration service. Formerly “EC2 Container Service”, it lets you choose between managing your own EC2 compute (EC2 launch type) or going serverless with AWS Fargate. ECS has been around over 10 years so comes with years of features and learnings.
Azure Container Apps
Microsoft’s fully-managed, fully-serverless container service, built as a wrapper for Kubernetes (specifically AKS), but designed to abstract away the hundreds of 1,000-line YAML files.
Simplicity vs Control
Out of the box, ACA bundles a lot of features within the service itself. Unlike ECS, ACA comes with ingress and load balancing, and the ability to scale to zero based on HTTP traffic (something ECS cannot offer) all within the same console page. Compared to AWS’ tendency to need 8 different tabs open to see each service you’re using, this is an excellent feature. In ACA, you can make your application publicly available without a networking specialist certification. This can be brilliant, but making something unintentionally public will likely lead to some exciting conversations with your security team.
To be fair to AWS, this reflects the advanced set of features each of these AWS services offers. In exchange for a higher up-front development cost, AWS gives you a great deal of future flexibility. If you need full control over the compute, the EC2 launch type allows you to run on your EC2 instances which can be secured and tuned to your specific needs. ECS also has a more sophisticated task definition capability, allowing for more fine-grained control between multiple containers per task. Although more difficult, advanced networking configuration and security in AWS is available with the services you already need, avoiding the requirement to re-architect 6 months after launch.
ECS has also closed the gap significantly with the release of Native Blue/Green Deployments (previously requiring the CodeDeploy service).
Pricing
Focusing on Pay-as-you-go serverless compute costs alone, AWS costs around 33% the price of Azure (depending on region). However, this isn’t the full story; in AWS you would need to pay separately for your application load balancer (though with host-based routing, this can be shared between multiple applications), and ACA can helpfully scale to 0 based on traffic to save costs in quieter periods or on your development environments.
To counter that, AWS offers ARM processors which work out even cheaper, and Fargate Spot for interruption-tolerant tasks - perfect for batch processing or AI model training.
Both cloud providers also offer savings plans for your compute once you’re happy with your decision for 1 or 3 years, but AWS arguably wins here too. Its Compute Savings Plans offer a greater discount and are more flexible, applying discounts across Fargate, EC2, and Lambda, rather than being siloed to a single service.
Developer Experience and Ecosystem
Both platforms are well supported in their respective ecosystems. For observability (the part everyone forgets until it’s too late) - you’ve got Azure Application Insights with Azure Monitor and AWS CloudWatch. For secrets, both services also have a great integration with their relative secrets managers (Azure Key Vault and AWS Secrets Manager).
Azure Container Apps also integrates particularly nicely with Azure DevOps, offering built-in CI/CD and automatic deployments from source control. Meanwhile, AWS provides a set of actively-maintained GitHub actions that make building a container, authenticating to AWS, and deploying a new task simple.
If you’re developing microservices, ACA has built-in support for Dapr (distributed application runtime) which simplifies building microservice architectures. In AWS, you can use ECS Service Connect to interconnect multiple services across multiple clusters and networks.
Conclusion
Azure Container Apps is an excellent service for “Day 1” speed, making most common features available right within the service itself. However, as your system and its needs become more complex, AWS will give you greater control and flexibility to customise the service to your production needs and keep costs low, though the initial development effort is likely to be higher.
If you need help getting started with ECS, The Scale Factory’s application platform can skip this initial pain.
Want an easier route to running your workload in containers, with security, build automation, and scalability designed in? We offer a number of packaged application platforms that provide exactly that.
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
