AWS EC2 Container Service ECS

AWS EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows running applications on a managed cluster of EC2 instances
ECS eliminates the need to install, operate, and scale the cluster management infrastructure.
ECS is a regional service that simplifies running application containers in a highly available manner across multiple AZs within a region
ECS helps schedule the placement of containers across the cluster based on the resource needs and availability requirements.
ECS allows integration of your own custom scheduler or third-party schedulers to meet business or application specific requirements.

ECS Elements

Applications deployed on ECS must be architected to run in _docker containers, _which is a standardized unit of software development, containing everything that the software application needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, etc.
Containers are created from a read-only template called an image
Images are typically built from a Dockerfile, and stored in a registry from which they can be downloaded and run on your container instances.
ECS can be configured to access a private Docker image registry within a VPC, Docker Hub or is integrated with EC2 Container Registry (ECR)

Cluster is a logical grouping of EC2 container instances to run tasks using ECS
ECS downloads the container images from the specified registry, and runs those images on the container instances within your cluster.

Task definition is a description of an application that contains one or more docker containers
Task definition is needed to prepare application to run on ECS
Task definition is a text file in JSON format that describes one or more containers that form your application.
Task definitions specify various parameters for the application, such as containers to use, their repositories, ports to be opened, and data volumes

A task is the instantiation of a task definition on a container instance within the cluster.
After a task definition is created for the application within ECS, you can specify the number of tasks that will run on the cluster.
ECS task scheduler is responsible for placing tasks on container instances, with several different scheduling options available

ECS Service helps to run and maintain a specified number of instances of a task definition simultaneously.

Container agent runs on each instance within an ECS cluster
Container Agent sends information about the instance’s current running tasks and resource utilization to ECS, and starts and stops tasks whenever it receives a request from ECS

ECS helps in having a more fine-grained control for custom application architectures.
Elastic Beanstalk is ideal to leverage the benefits of containers but just want the simplicity of deploying applications from development to production by uploading a container image.
Elastic Beanstalk is more of an application management platform that helps customers easily deploy and scale web applications and services.
With Elastic Beanstalk, specify container images to be deployed, with the CPU & memory requirements, port mappings and container links.
Elastic Beanstalk abstracts the finer details and automatically handles all the details such as provisioning an ECS cluster, balancing load, auto-scaling, monitoring, and placing the containers across the cluster.

EC2 Container Service is a highly scalable Docker container management service that allows running and managing distributed applications in Docker containers.
AWS Lambda is an event-driven task compute service that runs code (Lambda functions) in response to “events” from event sources like SES, SNS, DynamoDB & Kinesis Streams, CloudWatch etc.