How can I use AWS containers?

AWS containers can make your applications reach high performance, automatically and scalable. But do you know how and when to use them? Do not worry! We'll tell you everything!

AWS containers help you run your architecture in an efficient, automated, and scalable way. Microservices, batch processing, machine learning, and migrating applications to the cloud are just some of the cases where AWS containers can be used. But do you know how it works and what are its possible uses?

Docker and AWS containers: what is the relationship between the two?

At Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) , everything starts with docker – it is important to understand what it is about before talking about containers , mainly to understand their differences and usability and most importantly: how they complement each other.

Docker is a technology that allows us to package software in standardized units called containers. AWS allows Docker containers to be used without any modifications, making development and maintenance easier. AWS containers hold everything your software needs to run, including libraries, system tools, application code, and the runtime engine. While docker allows you to quickly deploy and scale applications in any environment with the confidence that your code will run.

How do AWS containers work?

Elastic Container Service ( ECS) is an Amazon Web Services for automating your fleet of instances, delivering and running your AWS containers through them. It monitors your instances, how much resources they have and what they are running. On the Elastic Container Service (ECS), you find instances in your cluster that have the resources available to run AWS containers and instruct them to download the AWS containers from the registry and run them.

Let's see a step by step of how AWS containers work?

1st step – Define your application and Create your Cluster

Within Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), select the AWS container need for your application. In addition, also create a Cluster , which is a logical grouping of services ( services ) and tasks ( tasks ) in AWS.

Step 2 – Launch your AWS containers

After completing the previous step, you decide whether to launch your AWS containers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Amazon Fargate .

The difference is that in Fargate , all management is done automatically, without additional configurations. In EC2, you have a greater number of settings, but you also gain flexibility and a level of control, such as configuring the number of instances that will be used for your containers.

Step 3 – Manage your AWS containers

Amazon Elastic Container Service ( ECS) scales your application and manages your AWS containers for availability for both Fargate and EC2.

In the case of Fargate , you never worry about instances and autoscaling , as this is done automatically. Despite facilitating, it is possible to spend much more than expected, since the billing is not so simple and a scaling of containers can quickly incur high costs.

In the case of EC2, administration involves daily monitoring of your instances and containers, optimizing when necessary, but the control over the financial part is much more accurate: you know how much each instance will cost and the chance of scaling a lot is greatly reduced.

Why use AWS containers in my applications?

AWS containers help you maintain high performance in your applications in an easy, cost-effective and efficient way. Running in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS containers are highly secure. In addition to not sharing any computational resources with other customers, you can manage access permissions for AWS containers , isolating them to create fully trusted applications.

With the Elastic Container Service (ECS), the service responsible for AWS containers , you:

• Automates the deployment of docker applications;
• Easily manage clusters of any scale;
• It has native integrations with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) services;
• You don't need to install, maintain or update any software.

AWS containers are a great product, but we know there's always internal pressure to reduce costs — preferably without sacrificing stability down the road.

With this dilemma in mind, we created Sky.Saver , a solution that uses artificial intelligence to manage your infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This allows you to optimize the available resources, maintain the stability of your applications and reduce your costs by up to 80%. That is, you have the availability of EC2 for the price of SPOT machines!

Through our dashboard , you can track your investments and savings in real time. That way, you know exactly how much you're going to pay — in local currency, of course.

Want to try Sky.Saver free for 15 days? Talk to our consultants and understand how to reduce AWS infrastructure costs!