Has Amazon spent a lot of effort on ECS? I am totally ignorant here, but the people who I consider more knowledgeable about AWS things have said in a nutshell that "in 2015 the things I heard about ECS were not good things, and I have basically not heard any new things since then."
Basically stating that ECS was Amazon's attempt to plant a flag in the container-space and that it was half-hearted, not done with the rigor of solutions like k8s that had additional advantages of also being cloud-agnostic, and finally that ECS was not a solution that anyone they knew was recommending or would recommend.
First of all I can assure you that Amazon is 100% committed to containers. Amazon's compute strategy is aimed at three levels of abstraction: instances, containers, lambda. All three are equally important to Amazon.
With regard to ECS feature set relative to K8, the thing to understand is that AWS follows a startup-like strategy of launching an MVP and then letting customer feedback drive roadmap from there. AWS is definitely not half hearted about ECS. Rather AWS is constantly working with customers to define a roadmap for further development on ECS.
To me the most exciting thing about ECS is the open source work being done around ECS, for Blox (a framework for building out custom container scheduling logic), and the ECS agent itself:
With these ECS components you can open issues or even PR's just like any other open source project. Additionally another cool thing we are doing is sharing feature proposals for public comment. You can check out an Amazon employee's public fork of the ECS agent to see a preview of coming roadmap, and we are actively soliciting feedback on proposals such as this one:
hey yebyen- i was one of the very first beta users of ECS, and I now work for AWS. first off, sounds like maybe we're not doing the best job we can be with educating users on ECS- that's on us, and we'll focus on improving. to dig into your actual question: when ECS launched, the goal was to do a smaller number of things really well, and then listen to the community on what _they_ wanted to see from a container management platform, and grow accordingly. I've seen a number of significant improvements over the last year or so. Off the top of my head: ECR (thanks @coding123), task placement policies and strategies to give developers more control over how they place tasks and use resources, IAM roles for tasks, event stream for cloudwatch events, service level autoscaling, ALB support, and a number of smaller configuration changes, like multiple network modes, and out-of-the-box support for and awslogs driver. also discovered while writing a workshop the other day that there is a pretty sweet first-run wizard for users just trying out ECS for the first time. in any case, a couple of main takeaways here: i'm seeing a focus on adding features and services that reduce the operational work for developers- let AWS worry about scaling and managing your cluster infrastructure, and you can focus on building cool stuff. beyond that, though, developers have asked for more control, flexibility, and extensibility, and i think ECS is working on delivering that: the cloudwatch event stream can be consumed by other services, the blox open source project (and the already opensourced ecs-agent) let you build custom schedulers/functionality on top of what AWS offers, placement policies let you customize how ECS consumes your cluster resources. would love to know where you get your news and why you haven't heard much about ECS, so we can make sure we fix it. if you want to talk more, you can also DM me
From an engineering POV, this line makes the most sense out of all:
> when ECS launched, the goal was to do a smaller number of things really well, and then listen to the community on what _they_ wanted to see from a container management platform, and grow accordingly
I'm coming from a small CoreOS cluster on bare metal, onto Kubernetes and Helm on EC2 nodes. I was a Fleet user before and I loved it! But always with the understanding that when things got better in the cluster space, I'd move from Fleet toward some resource aware scheduler.
I love to read how you're all going down a similar road, however you get there! Thanks for the blox links and I think I will be able to make immediate use of ECR with the rest of my AWS stack.
awesome! keep me posted on how ECR works out for you. If you build something sweet, write about it and let me know! we love blog posts/write ups/all that jazz.
I do want to talk more, but I don't know how to DM on HackerNews... I am also yebyen @ gmail
I went looking for how to enable ECR and I didn't find it, is this a feature you can only use from within ECS?
On my legacy CoreOS cluster I always used Deis components to (theoretically) manage all of the cluster things. Kubernetes offloads many of these concerns to the Cloud provider, and handles others of them using Addons. Can I get ECR as my private registry on a Kubernetes cluster running on EC2 nodes?
Basically stating that ECS was Amazon's attempt to plant a flag in the container-space and that it was half-hearted, not done with the rigor of solutions like k8s that had additional advantages of also being cloud-agnostic, and finally that ECS was not a solution that anyone they knew was recommending or would recommend.