ECS vs EKS

When to use AWS-native container orchestration versus Kubernetes.

Overview

What is being compared

ECS is AWS-native container orchestration designed for simplicity. EKS is managed Kubernetes that opens the full CNCF ecosystem. The decision comes down to team expertise, multi-cloud ambitions and how complex your workloads are.

  • What it is — AWS-native orchestration — Managed Kubernetes
  • Design goal — Simplicity — Access to the full CNCF ecosystem
  • Team fit — AWS-only shops, smaller teams — Teams with existing Kubernetes expertise
  • Cloud scope — AWS only — Multi-cloud portability
  • Workloads — Simpler web services, Fargate-based workloads — Complex scheduling and affinity needs
  • Tooling — AWS-native integrations — CNCF tooling

Who owns each job

Both run on the same compute, behind the same load balancers. What changes is how much of the platform is yours to run. Green is AWS, yellow is you.

> [!TIP] The decision itself, the request path, scaling and IAM are played step by step in Visual Explanation below.

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