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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

AWS already has two other ways of hosting Docker containers: EC2 Container Service [1] and Elastic Beanstalk [2].

Container service apparently "provides more fine-grained control and access to a wider set of use cases" compared to Beanstalk.

What's the difference of this third option? If you are new to AWS and/or Docker, how do you know which to choose?

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/... [2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/creat...

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I don't have that much experience with ECS, but it's a lot different than just having a remote docker host or docker swarm. You can't use docker-compose to just automagically spin up a project. I think they have their own yaml format that's similar to docker-compose V1 files, but it's cumbersome to not know what is and isn't supported and what amazon specific features you need to use, etc.

If you're new to AWS but know Docker (like me) then Docker for AWS seems like a winner.

> If you're new to AWS but know Docker (like me) then Docker for AWS seems like a winner.

I'd disagree. It seems you still need to know AWS well enough to setup the various prerequisites. If you're new to AWS but know Docker, you're far better off with something like Convox (which does support docker-compose files)

I meant that only as a comparison between ECS and Docker for AWS.

EC2 is not a Docker solution. EC2 Task&Service definitions are not Docker Task&Service definitions. So this basically ties to with the AWS platform. You can not move your Docker infra between AWS and Azure. Docker for AWS is the way to go, but I believe it could be enhanced greatly. I also think that AWS does not seem to support Docker Swarm very eagerly, because I think AWS still did not figure out to charge Containers, they are still charging Nodes.

This is lower level - installing engines and clustering them using Docker Swarm.

ECS provides a GUI and uses its own orchestration layer rather than Docker Swarm.

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