Ask HN: Help choosing between AWS ECS and EKS

ECS Fargate. We used it for a lot of stateless containers, similar as you mention. I tried to migrate from ECS Fargate onto EKS, but moved back after a while. The reason was the "management" overhead of babysitting the cluster and it's non-app deployment like cilium, fluxcd etc. - Since those were part needed and part QoL features we came to the conclusion that ECS Fargate was the better and less 'head ache' solution. I would do it again. Especially not thinking about provision new nodes etc.

Sure you pay for that comfortable solution, but it was worth in my opinion

If you don't need anything beyond the feature set of ECS and are happy to stick with AWS for the foreseeable future, then I'd advise you to listen to your gut - EKS is more complex, and needs a bit more looking after.

Personally, I'd disagree with your consultants on being able to avoid multiple AWS accounts as a selling point. When you need to isolate workloads or implement hard security boundaries, accounts are generally the simplest and most reliable way of doing that. Following the Well Architected Framework is a good standard practice and there are plenty of guides and examples to help you.

If things do change in the future, it's not actually that big a deal to deploy to EKS instead (or as well) - but for your needs, I think ECS would make a better starting point.

(And I agree with other posters that ECS Fargate is likely the best fit for you)

Agreed with the others. Also, shameless plug, you might like Ravion[1] for more quickly setting up your AWS infra and more easily monitoring and maintaining it over time.

[1] https://www.ravion.com

Go with ECS if you don’t need Helm and significant operational overhead. Having used both ECS and EKS for the past few years, I’ve found that ECS requires negligible maintenance.

BTW: Checkout ecs fargate too. if workload is small this will do the most.

> My gut is telling me ECS is the better choice for this team - simpler, no operational maintenance, almost no additional abstractions beyond the AWS primitives people will need to learn anyway. A consulting team hired before I was brought in are pushing EKS, but I’m not convinced that the improved devex is worth the increase in complexity and operational burden for our team.

Yes, I'd say 100% ECS given what you've said here. Don't add complexity until you need it. When you have a larger and more mature devops team you can always reassess if it's time to consider EKS.

Also, definitely have multiple AWS accounts either way. This is very standard and arguably best practice. AWS have management accounts specifically for this reason. Keep developers off prod and on a AWS separate account where you (and they) can be 100% certain they can't do any harm.

But at the end of the day, neither are strictly wrong and what you're asking here is largely a question of corporate politics. If you don't feel you have a strong voice yet, then just try to have a good sense of the pros and cons of the different options you're considering and present a well reasoned opinion. If you're told you're wrong or you're overruled, then that's okay! Ultimately either will work, and right now it's probably better that you focus on building trust before being too opinionated.

Have done both and I'd say ECS wins almost always, as long as you can be in AWS. If you are true unicorn/hyperscale, Kube will start to pay off. But otherwise, the upgrade treadmill of kube and the blank stare of SWE's who don't want to learn helm charts, argo, ingress controllers etc are not worth dealing with when you can just ship ECS and have it work for years with minimal overhead.

startups/small-medium businesses implementing Kube are doing it for cargo cult reasons or stealth career development/employment security initiatives by the relevant devops or sre teams.

ECS fargate is a must as well because no "server" means a ton less compliance burden.

Don’t argue with the consultants.

It is not a hill worth dying on.

And you don’t know the big picture, but the little picture is everyone agreed the consultants were the right way to decide before you were there; arguing implies the people who sign contracts and write the checks are wrong; and business decisions are about the whole business and engineering exists to support the business - not to optimize itself.

To put it simply, the decision has been made by people with more experience in your organization’s culture, more authority, and a better understanding of the business as a whole.

Plus your here on HN because you have not convinced the stakeholders.

Good luck.

That really depends on they type of consultancy, the terms of the engagement, and where the responsibility lies (for both the requirements and the outcomes).

If the consultancy was brought in to do the move from Heroku but not build or run anything beyond that, then I would normally expect the client to set the tradeoff between DevEx (argues for EKS) vs simplicity/operability (argues for ECS). In that case, it would be perfectly reasonable for the OP to input into that decision.

It's definitely worth speaking to whoever is responsible for engaging the consultancy - there should be an agreed Statement of Work and at least a rough RACI matrix for each deliverable, showing who the stakeholders are and how they interact.

it would be perfectly reasonable for the OP to input into that decision

As a recent employee, the OP was not there when the consultants were taking input.

It looks like the decision was made before the OP came on board.

At this point the appropriate behavior is to accept the consensus because working together in the present is more important than a hypothetical future of possible minor benefit.

And for perspective, not knowing the players is a minefield of dumbtax. Consultants often have long standing relationships with clients’ senior staff and there can be everything from holiday gift boxes to golf weekends to Vegas junkets to direct family ties.

Relitigating the details of an obvious business decision is stupid on many levels.