Section 18: Containers on AWS: ECS, Fargate, ECR & EKS

Question 1

What is a container?

Answer 1

A container is a bundle that contains an application and all its dependencies.

Question 2

What is the benefit of a container over a VM (virtual machine)?

Answer 2

Containers provide the isolation benefits of virtualization with faster starts and less overhead, as well as portable, consistent environments.

Question 3

What is Amazon ECS?

Answer 3

Amazon’s own container platform, ECS is a highly scalable and fast container management service.

Question 4

What does Amazon ECS do and how does it work?

Answer 4

ECS allows you to launch docker containers on AWS. AWS manages the starting and stopping of containers, but the user must provision and maintain the underlying infrastructure (EC2s) unless using Fargate. It is free, so ECS is not costly and it integrates with many AWS services.

Question 5

How does the Amazon ECS Fargate launch type work?

Answer 5

The Fargate launch type does not make you provision infrastructure, making it a serverless way to launch docker containers. Just create task definitions and there you go.

Question 6

How do you scale ECS Fargate launch type?

Answer 6

Scaling Fargate is simple, just increase the number of tasks

Question 7

What is Amazon EKS?

Answer 7

EKS = Elastic Kubernetes Service. It is a way to launch managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS.

Question 8

What is Kubernetes?

Answer 8

Kubernetes is an open source system for automatic deployment, scaling and management of containerized (usually Docker) applications

Question 9

What is the major EKS use case?

Answer 9

EKS is most useful for companies already using Kubernetes that want to migrate to AWS using Kubernetes.