Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Reduce your operational and infrastructure costs with Amazon ECS (CON308)

Summary

• Vibhav, a senior product manager for Amazon ECS, shares best practices for reducing operational and infrastructure costs with ECS.
• ECS is a fully managed container orchestration solution that has evolved to include EC2, Fargate, and ECS Anywhere.
• ECS runs 2.25 billion tasks weekly and is the first choice for 65% of new AWS containers customers.
• Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure management.
• ECS is considered a serverless container orchestrator, with no control plane management required by the user.
• The session covers three key principles for cost optimization: operating less, utilizing more efficiently, and making informed infrastructure choices.
• Operating less involves focusing on application code and innovation rather than infrastructure management.
• Utilizing more efficiently includes right-sizing tasks, auto-scaling services, and optimizing cluster utilization.
• Infrastructure choices involve selecting the right hardware, capacity type, and commitment-based discounts.
• AWS Graviton, EC2 and Fargate Spot, and savings plans are recommended for cost savings.
• Francis from CleverTap shares their journey with ECS, including a transition to Fargate and lessons learned.

Insights

• ECS's evolution reflects AWS's commitment to simplifying container management and reducing operational overhead for developers.
• The popularity of ECS among new AWS container customers suggests a strong market preference for managed services over self-managed orchestration solutions.
• The move towards serverless architectures, as seen with Fargate, is driven by the desire to reduce the complexity and cost associated with infrastructure management.
• The principles of operating less and utilizing more efficiently are not unique to ECS but are general best practices in cloud cost optimization.
• The session emphasizes the importance of continuous right-sizing and auto-scaling to ensure cost-effective resource utilization.
• AWS Graviton's performance benefits and cost savings highlight the potential advantages of using custom silicon over traditional hardware.
• Spot capacity utilization reflects a growing trend in cloud computing to leverage spare capacity for cost savings, provided workloads can tolerate potential interruptions.
• Savings plans are a strategic financial commitment that can lead to significant cost reductions for predictable workloads.
• CleverTap's experience with ECS and Fargate provides real-world insights into the practical challenges and benefits of migrating to a serverless container platform.
• The session underscores the importance of enabling features like ECS exec upfront and the benefits of using default credentials provider chains for IAM roles to ensure smooth transitions between different compute environments.