There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS. You pay for AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments.
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Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Apache Mesos
Features
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Apache Mesos
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon ECS is well suited for the scenarios where you want to deploy a microservice to a cloud and instead of manually specifying instance size, number of instances and then specifying the configurations and connecting it with other cloud services like database service, secret manager service etc., you just want to specify these configurations as a file and using that file, the ECS would deploy the service and keep it healthy. It might be less suited for a scenario when you don't want to stick to AWS specific solution for your microservice deployment. The ECS configuration file is specific to AWS ECS and may not be useful for other cloud providers like Azure etc.
There's really no reason to ever use Mesos. We switched over to Kubernetes and it's been a breath of fresh air - better CD support, easy CLI for browsing logs, no mysterious dangling redeploys. If you're looking for a tool to manage a fleet of Docker containers on VMs, Kubernetes beats Mesos by a wide margin.
One of the biggest advantages is the flexibility to change underlying EC2 instances. As the traffic or demand increases, we can easily change EC2 instances without any issues.
Amazon ECS APIs are extremely robust and one can start and stop containers by firing one post request only. So, it is not mandatory to keep the demo solutions up for every time. Just at the time of demo fire the command - make the container up and running - do the demo - down the container with API. A simple portal can control every container which helps non-technical (sales, marketing) to do the demo without keeping the solutions up for the entire time frame.
Mesos may have many frameworks. If you have Mesos installed on your servers, you may use it for many kinds of tasks. Today we're running only web applications but the idea is to install a different framework for big data soon.
Another AWS Service - While AWS has a service for just about everything, that is also a negative point. There is no service that does 4 out of 4 things you need. This service does 3 out of 4, another service does the fourth thing you need and another two things that the other service does.
With AWS things in general, it's really hard to remain cloud agnostic. Keep that in mind.
Unreliable deployments that would fail for no good reason. Sometimes our Docker container would be "restarting" forever because Mesos thought it didn't have enough resources to start the container.
Impossibly slow UI. Built in React under the hood with a lot of bloatware backed in, so loading the Mesos UI on a slow internet connection was painful.
No real logging solution - it would stream "console.log()" output to the UI, but searching for logs wasn't really possible without downloading a huge file.
No built-in support for redeploying containers from a CI. We had to create a service whose whole job was to expose an HTTP endpoint that restarted a container, and then made Circle CI ping the endpoint whenever we wanted to redeploy.
Aside from some ECS-specific terms to learn at first, learning & starting to use ECS is relatively straightforward. AWS docs on the topic are also of high quality, with sound & relevant examples to follow. Troubleshooting container issues is also a breeze thanks to CloudWatch integration & helpful error messages on the AWS console.
Support is relatively good, although the documentation sometimes is lacking, as well as outdated in our experience, especially when we initiated the process of using this service. But once we found how to assemble things, we haven't really required support from anyone at AWS, the service works without problems so we haven't had the need to contact support, which speaks well of how ECS is built.
I chose Amazon ECS over Amazon EKS and other products because the whole infrastructure was decided to be designed on AWS cloud and Amazon ECS made it easier to make the clusters live in just a few minutes. Amazon ECS has better integration with other AWS services and we don't have to look for plugins to do the things, everything is available and can be configured from the AWS console.
Kubernetes is really great and their community is growing really fast (Google influence). We evaluated it in the beginning and it would fit for our web applications workload. We decided to proceed with Mesos because it has more potential. You may use a different framework for different kinds of tasks on Mesos. There is a Kubernetes framework for Mesos, by the way.
