An 101 intro to AWS’s numerous commonly confusing abbreviations.
Q: EC2 V.S. ECS?
- An ECS (Elastic Container Service) is basically a logical and/or regional grouping/cluster of EC2 machines/instances [1]
Q: ECS V.S. EKS?
- EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) runs Kubernetes instead of Containers
Q: Docker V.S. Kubernetes?
- Docker Compose networks containers within the same host
- Docker Swarm and Kubernetes networks containers across multiple hosts [2]
Q: Docker Registry V.S. Repository?
- Docker Registry: a service that stores docker images, could be hosted by any third party (Docker Hub, Google Container Registry, AWS Container Registry, etc.), or yourself
- Docker Repository: a collection of different docker images with the same name but different tags. [3]
Q: What is Serverless and why use?
- Usually when you deploy a service, you rent a server and set up everything you need before running it.
- Serverless means that you only need to input your code to have it run, and don’t have to worry about how the environment is set up.
- The main reason people tend to migrate over to serverless is to remove the need to maintain the scaling of servers [4].
- So, by its definition, EC2 provides traditional servers, whereas Lambda/Fargate are serverless.
Q: AWS Fargate V.S. AWS Lambda?
- Lambda:
- Is event driven
- Spawn one instance per request
- Has numerous limits (process time within 15 minutes, response size within 6mb, etc.), so it’s more suitable for smaller tasks.
- Fargate:
- Is a serverless subset of ECS
- Runs docker container based on a Task Definition
- Its number of instances can be configured to auto-scale based on many AWS triggers
