AWS offers several ways to run containers — ECS (Elastic Container Service, AWS's own orchestrator), EKS (managed Kubernetes), and Fargate (serverless containers, no servers to manage). Understanding the options helps choose the right container platform.
ECS — AWS's container orchestrator
ECS runs and orchestrates Docker containers on AWS:
→ simpler than Kubernetes; deeply integrated with AWS (IAM, ALB, CloudWatch, VPC)
→ TASK (a running container set), TASK DEFINITION (the spec), SERVICE (keeps N tasks
running, integrates with load balancers, auto-scales)
→ good for teams wanting container orchestration without Kubernetes complexity
