Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) vs. Percona Kubernetes Operators

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

Production ready, robust DB solution built for Kubernetes envs, we was able, for the first time, to ship production db workloads inside k8s. Be sure to check differences with "traditional" MySQL and other clustering solutions. Also be sure to match it with proper k8s storage solutions.

• 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

• Easy and fast deployment.
• A reliable, fully automated, high-available db lifecycle management solution.
• Exaustive documentation.
• Production ready.

• 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

• Some differences compared to "traditional" MySQL solution.
• Had some hard times trying to use it combined with pre-existing techs like WordPress, Magento, etc.
• The specific k8s environment features can have an impact on it, like the storage solutions offered by the cloud vendor.

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

Easy and fast deployment. A reliable, fully automated, high-available db lifecycle management solution. It requires a bit of learning time for people new to operators ecosystem.

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

Well documented, there was no need to contact support.

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

For a long time we struggled finding a viable solution to migrate our existing db workloads inside Kubernetes. Before "operators era" proper db workloads required manual management, of course that easily raised administrative overhead. Then the future started to be brighter with the introduction of operators and the "official" Oracle's MySQL Operator, then Presslab's one, finally Percona's operator. Compared to other operators, the last one allowed us to ship production db workloads inside k8s.

• 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

• It allowed us to use k8s on our entire infrastructure.
• Decreased administrative overhead around our db services.
• As it is an open source technology, it cut down our db pricings.