What is the difference between EC2 virtual machines and managed container services ECS in AWS?

The main difference between EC2 and ECS in AWS lies in the level of abstraction and infrastructure management:

• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) — these are virtual machines (servers) that you manage yourself. You choose the operating system, install software, configure scaling and updates. EC2 provides full control over the server.

• ECS (Elastic Container Service) — this is a managed service for running containers (e.g., Docker). ECS allows you to run and scale containers without managing virtual machines directly. AWS handles infrastructure management, and you only manage containers and their configuration.

In simpler terms, EC2 are virtual servers, and ECS is a container orchestration service that can use EC2 or Fargate (serverless) to run containers.

Example:

• If you want full control and are running a monolithic application, EC2 is a better fit.
• If you are using microservices in containers and want to simplify management, ECS is the preferred choice.