What's the Difference Between Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS?
Compare Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
|
Comparisons
|
Amazon EC2
|
Amazon ECS
|
|---|---|---|
|
Category
|
Compute, Virtual Machines |
Containers, Orchestration |
|
Description
|
Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload |
Fully managed AWS native container orchestration service |
|
Best for
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
Pricing model
|
On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans |
No additional charge for EC2 launch type; Fargate pricing for Fargate launch type |
|
Free tier
|
Yes |
No |
|
Expert take
|
“EC2 gives you full control over the compute environment with 750+ instance types. For workloads that need sustained CPU, GPU acceleration, or specific OS configurations, EC2 remains the most flexible option on AWS.” |
“ECS is the fastest path to running containers on AWS. Deep integration with IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC means less glue code, and flexible compute options (EC2, Fargate, or ECS Managed Instances) let you match infrastructure to your workload without managing orchestration overhead.” |
|
Product page
|
When to use Amazon EC2 or Amazon ECS
Use Amazon EC2 when:
- Web hosting
- Batch processing
- HPC
- Machine learning training
- Gaming servers
Use Amazon ECS when:
- Microservices
- Batch jobs
- Application migration
- Hybrid deployments
Next steps with AWS for Compute
AWS product comparisons
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages