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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.

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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
  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers
  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments
Key features
  • Auto Scaling
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • GPU instances
  • Bare metal instances
  • Nitro System
  • AWS Fargate integration
  • Service auto scaling
  • Service mesh
  • Capacity providers
  • Spot instances
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.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Aditya Ramakrishnan, AWS Product Marketing Manager

Product page

When to use Amazon EC2 or Amazon ECS

Use Amazon EC2 when:

  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers

Learn more about Amazon EC2 »

Use Amazon ECS when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments

Learn more about Amazon ECS »

AWS product comparisons

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