What is the difference between Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2?

Question

I\'m just getting started on AWS EC2. I understand that EC2 is like a remote computer where I can do pretty much everything I want. Then I found out about ECS. I know it use

Answer 1

Put simply, Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a Docker container orchestration service.

You can ask it to run one or more Docker images, either as an auto-scaling capable "Service" or as an ad-hoc "Task".

The services and tasks run on a "Cluster". Originally, a Cluster was a group of one or more pre-configured EC2 servers running ECS Cluster Agent. The Cluster Agent would schedule the containers on the EC2 server. These EC2 servers show up in your EC2 Instances list and are charged at regular EC2 per-minute costs - You can even SSH onto them like any normal EC2 server. If you wanted more capacity to run more Services or Tasks, or if you wanted resilience against EC2 failure, then you would more EC2 servers.

Around November 2017, AWS added ECS Fargate. Now a Cluster can run "serverless" without provisioning EC2 nodes. You simply define the amount of CPU and memory your Task or Service requires to operate, meaning that you just pay for the CPU and memory time rather than the EC2.