Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. Microsoft Azure

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is well suited where you need the ease of managing the clusters by letting AWS do the stuff for you. Obviously, whenever you want to run the docker based workloads, it is always better to go for either AWS ECS or AWS EKS. If you are interested in staying at AWS only and don't want to be cloud-agnostic, then go for AWS ECS instead of AWS EKS. AWS ECS is cheaper than AWS EKS and also more managed by AWS and better integrated with other AWS services. If you want to run those workloads as serverless, then AWS ECS Fargate is the best option to go with. If you already have a Kubernetes based setup that you want to migrate to AWS, then go for AWS EKS instead of AWS ECS.

Incentivized

Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.

Incentivized

• Well Integrated - As with the majority of AWS services, ECS works will with any other AWS product (Route 53, CloudWatch, IAM, etc).
• Easy to get started with - It is easy to get started building just about anything in AWS and using ECS is no exception to this rule. Be careful though -- AWS lets you do/build anything in any way you could think of and allowing yourself to shoot yourself in the foot is no exception.

Incentivized

• Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
• Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
• BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
• Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.

Incentivized

• The user interface sometimes seem to be confusing and cumbersome. It can be improved so that people can understand clearly which section to go for which functionality.
• When a container fails, the error logs are not readily available on the ECS console. If it can be provided it would be easier to debug from there itself instead of going to our log manager.
• Sometimes the old EC2 containers become stale and need to be restarted manually. There should be a notification for such scenarios. We have mostly been finding it out on our own and then fixing it by manually restarting EC2 instances.
• If this could be proactively monitored and notified, it would be great.

Incentivized

• In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
• Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
• Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.

Incentivized

We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.

Incentivized

Aside from some ECS-specific terms to learn at first, learning & starting to use ECS is relatively straightforward. AWS docs on the topic are also of high quality, with sound & relevant examples to follow. Troubleshooting container issues is also a breeze thanks to CloudWatch integration & helpful error messages on the AWS console.

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Support is relatively good, although the documentation sometimes is lacking, as well as outdated in our experience, especially when we initiated the process of using this service. But once we found how to assemble things, we haven't really required support from anyone at AWS, the service works without problems so we haven't had the need to contact support, which speaks well of how ECS is built.

Incentivized

Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a good beginner level orchestration service but lacks container management and scaling capabilities. EC2 is again not a Managed cloud service. It is like just renting a computer on cloud and then managing it on our own. Compared to these ECS is a comprehensive solution that provides management, scaling, containerization and other service connectivity out of the box.

Incentivized

I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.

• We run 8 web applications (demo instances) on a single machine. At a particular time, no more than 3 applications run simultaneously. So, we keep only required containers up. This helps us to provision small EC2 machines without compromising performance.
• Overall Amazon ECS helps to have less number of dedicated machines as more than one solution can be deployed on a single instance. This reduces costs a lot.

Incentivized

• Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
• In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
• Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.