Container-Based Compute and Microservices

Question 1

What is a Container, and what is the most used one?

Answer 1

o A Container is a package that contains an application, libraries and file system required to run it
o Containers run on a container engine which generally runs within a single OS, such as Linux (key difference with Virtual Machine: 10 VMs running on the same physical host would have 10 copies of the OS, as VM are completely segregated, and managed through an Hypervisor)
o Containers provide the isolation benefits of Virtualisation, but are more lightweight, allowing faster starts and more dense packing within a host
o A popular container engine is Docker, which is the basis for Elastic Container Service (ECS)
o An Image is a collection of file system layers. Docker File Systems are differential – each layer stores differences from the previous layers

Question 2

What is Elastic Container Service (ECS)?

Answer 2

o ECS is a managed container engine. It allows docker containers to be deployed and managed within AWS environments.
o ECS can use infrastructure clusters based on EC2 or Fargate, where AWS manage the backing infrastructure