What is Amazon Elastic Container Service?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. Your containers are defined in a task definition which you use to run individual tasks or as a service. You can run your tasks and services on a serverless infrastructure that is managed by AWS Fargate or, for more control over your infrastructure, you can run your tasks and services on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances that you manage.

Amazon ECS enables you to launch and stop your container-based applications with simple API calls. You can also retrieve the state of your cluster from a centralized service and, for existing users of Amazon EC2, access many familiar Amazon EC2 features.

You can schedule the placement of your containers across your cluster based on your resource needs, isolation policies, and availability requirements. With Amazon ECS, you do not have to operate your own cluster management and configuration management systems or worry about scaling your management infrastructure.

Amazon ECS can be used to create a consistent deployment and build experience, manage, and scale batch and Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) workloads, and build sophisticated application architectures on a microservices model.