I’m going to catch a lot of flak for this post, but I think it’s an important statement. In the most common cases, configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef encourage bad practices and should be avoided instead of celebrated. The only exception to this is managing an on-premise server fleet that can’t leverage software like Kubernetes, CoreOS, Apache Mesos or emulate an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform like AWS or GCP.
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We have lots of ways to host web applications these days – AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Heroku, Linode – the list goes on. But as many options as there are, each option comes with its own potential set of challenges. The cheaper VPS options don’t always provide an easy means to scale your application with load balancers, health checks, and autoscaling features. More expensive options like AWS have the means to scale your application, but require a more complicated setup process and cost more money.
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This is Part 4 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Conclusion If you’d read up until this point, it’s probably no surprise what I’m going to write here. Kubernetes is an open source project that can run on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Mesos, Azure, SoftLayer, CenturyLink Cloud, your local machine (minikube), CoreOS, and bare metal. It’s design is based on concepts from running containers at Google for 15 years.
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This is Part 3 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Kubernetes As a Google sponsored system, running Kubernetes on anything but Google Container Engine always seemed somewhat like a mismatch to me. AWS seemed to have too many nuances with how their load balancers, VPCs, and security groups worked when compared to Google Container Engine, that running Kubernetes on top of a different IaaS would be risky and error-prone.
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This is Part 2 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 ECS (Elastic Container Service) ECS is Amazon’s answer to container orchestration. It’s a bit rough around the edges and definitely a leap from Elastic Beanstalk, but it does have the advantage of significantly more flexibility including the ability to even define a custom scheduler. All of the limitations imposed by Elastic Beanstalk are lifted. But, so is the simplified interface and the ease of deploying applications onto the cluster.
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This isn’t going to be a super-technical review of these 3 platforms, but more of a high-level overview of what to expect when engaging with each. If you’re coming here with little knowledge of containerization or running container-based workloads, here’s a short gist. Tools like Docker and rkt provide a way to run programs in containers, isolated from the rest of a system leveraging Linux control groups. Running applications this way leads to better composability, organization, and helps build immutable infrastructure that’s more robust and easier to manage.
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