You’ve probably heard teams ask: “Should we use EC2 or ECS?”
That question makes about as much sense as comparing apples to freight trains. Let’s clear this up.
EC2: You Get the Machine
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) gives you virtual machines. That’s it. You choose the instance type, size, region, and operating system. After that, it’s all on you—OS patches, networking, scaling, and monitoring.
If you want to run Docker containers on EC2, go for it. But you’ll be responsible for installing Docker, setting up your own scheduler, and handling updates. Think of EC2 as raw compute. Powerful, but very manual.
ECS: You Get the Scheduler
ECS (Elastic Container Service) handles container orchestration. It figures out where to run your containers, manages scheduling, restarts containers when they crash, and helps you scale. You provide the container image, ECS takes care of placing and running it across your instances (or Fargate, if you go serverless).
You can run ECS on top of EC2 or use Fargate to skip provisioning altogether.
So it’s not “EC2 vs ECS” — they’re not replacements for each other. EC2 is the engine. ECS is the driver. You can use EC2 without ECS. You can’t use ECS without compute underneath it.
Why Do People Struggle With ECS?
ECS simplifies container orchestration—but only to a point.
You still have to deal with:
- IAM roles and task definitions
- Networking across services
- Managing EC2 capacity if not using Fargate
- Debugging service discovery issues
- Rolling out updates safely
- Handling logs, metrics, and alerts
- And making it all work in your own VPC, securely
Many teams find themselves writing a lot of custom glue code or building internal tooling just to manage ECS workflows. It’s easier than doing it all from scratch, but it’s not exactly “one-click.”
Kapstan: The Better Alternative
Kapstan offers a simpler way to run containers—without the overhead of ECS or the raw setup work of EC2.
You bring your code. We containerize it (if you haven’t already). Then, in a few clicks, it runs in your own cloud on a production-ready Kubernetes cluster.
With Kapstan:
- You get your own EKS-backed environment; and a simple UI based abstraction to interact with and manage it.
- No ECS task definitions or Fargate decisions
- Built-in CI/CD, observability, and secrets
- Works across AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Secure, automated, and in your control
For teams migrating off EC2 or trying to make ECS work, Kapstan is meant to be the platform they thought they were getting in the first place.
30 min to spin up a well-architected environment on Kapstan
A UI to configure and deploy workloads
(optional)
Observibility built-in
Want to run containers without getting buried AWS docs, or Kubernetes without YAML?
Try Kapstan – it’s free for 2 month
