EKS vs ECS: The Brutally Honest Guide for Small Teams

Bottom line first: If you're running 3-5 services without dedicated DevOps people, use ECS with Fargate. EKS will cost you 4x more and eat up way more time than it's worth at your scale.

Still on the fence? You're not the only one — these two trip up a lot of smart teams. Here’s a quick FAQ to clear the air so you can stop doom-scrolling Reddit. Don’t worry, we’ll dig into all the gritty details further down.

The main difference between ECS and EKS comes down to how much control and complexity you’re willing to take on.

1. What is the difference between Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS?

Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a fully managed container orchestration service by AWS that runs Docker containers without needing Kubernetes.
Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is AWS’s managed Kubernetes offering, allowing users to run Kubernetes workloads on AWS.

Both ECS and EKS are AWS container orchestration services, but only EKS is based on an open-source container orchestration platform — Kubernetes.

2. Which is better for small teams: ECS or EKS?

For small teams without dedicated DevOps engineers, ECS with Fargate is usually the better choice. It's simpler to set up, requires less ongoing maintenance, and costs significantly less than EKS.

3. When should I use Amazon EKS instead of ECS?

Use Amazon EKS if your team:

• has real Kubernetes experience
• manages 50+ microservices
• needs multi-cloud support
• has strict compliance or infrastructure-as-code requirements.
  Otherwise, ECS is often more efficient for smaller use cases.

4. Is ECS easier to manage than EKS?

Yes. ECS abstracts away most of the infrastructure and orchestration details. EKS requires in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, VPC networking, IAM roles, and regular version upgrades.

5. How do ECS and EKS compare in terms of cost?

ECS typically costs less overall. EKS charges $73/month per cluster and often needs additional tools and operational time. ECS has no control plane fees, and Fargate handles infrastructure automatically.

6. Can I migrate from ECS to EKS later?

Yes. AWS supports container portability. You can start with ECS and migrate to EKS if your architecture grows in complexity or you adopt Kubernetes tooling later on.

7. Does ECS support Kubernetes?

No. ECS is a separate container orchestration system and does not use Kubernetes. If you want to use Kubernetes on AWS, Amazon EKS is the solution.

8. What are common use cases for EKS and ECS?

• ECS: Small services, quick deployments, teams without DevOps, serverless containers (Fargate).
• EKS: Complex microservices, service mesh, custom networking, teams already using Kubernetes.

ECS is AWS's own container service. You write a simple JSON file describing your container, tell it how much CPU and RAM you need, and hit deploy. That's basically it. AWS handles everything else - the servers, the scheduling, the recovery when things break. It takes maybe a week to get comfortable with it if you already know AWS.

EKS is AWS running Kubernetes for you. Except they only run the control plane - you still have to set up the worker nodes, configure the networking (which has specific requirements that aren't obvious), install a bunch of add-ons manually, and learn Kubernetes itself. One developer who'd used Kubernetes since 2015 wrote a post called "The Awfulness of AWS EKS", saying AWS built it backwards - wrapping AWS stuff around Kubernetes instead of making Kubernetes work naturally on AWS.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service is designed for teams that already use Kubernetes and want to stay within AWS’s managed environment.

With ECS and Fargate, you can be in production in 1-2 days if you know AWS. The console actually helps. You need maybe 50-100 lines of Terraform. AWS handles literally everything - patching, scaling nodes, and recovering failed containers.

ECS is a managed service that lets you run containers without thinking about EC2 instances or the control plane. It’s great for launching a containerized application fast, with no Kubernetes required.

ECS is great if you just want to run containers without worrying about infrastructure. You define your containerized application, and AWS takes care of the rest. An ECS cluster can run multiple services across availability zones, and AWS handles most of the heavy lifting.

With EKS, budget 1-2 weeks, including learning time. You need 300-500+ lines of Terraform just for the basic setup. The list of things you have to configure manually is exhausting: VPC with specific subnet requirements, worker nodes, kubectl setup, three core add-ons, IAM integration, the load balancer controller (separate install), storage drivers... Most of it you have to do from the command line because the console is limited.

A team that migrated from ECS to EKS documented the experience. They saved 20% on costs but immediately hit problems with intermittent 503 errors from buggy ingress controllers and CPU throttling from misconfigured resource limits. Their takeaway: "There is no general guideline for this, and you'll have to observe the traffic pattern of your services to get this right. It is a continuous process."

Cloud cost isn’t just what shows up on your AWS bill — it's also your team’s time. ECS skips the control plane fee and works out of the box with AWS services like CloudWatch and RDS.

ECS: 2-4 hours a month. Deploy updates in minutes. Fargate patches itself automatically. CloudWatch just works. One team kept its old ECS system running while the company moved to EKS because "it just kept working" with almost no input.

EKS: 12-20 hours a month minimum. Kubernetes releases 3 versions per year, and you have to upgrade within 14 months or AWS charges you 6x more ($73/month → $438/month). Each upgrade takes 4-8 hours, and you can't roll back if something breaks. You also need to update nodes monthly for security patches, keep third-party tools in sync, and constantly tune resource allocation because Kubernetes doesn't do that for you.

The philosophy is different. ECS lets developers self-serve. EKS requires someone who knows what they're doing with Kubernetes, or your whole team slows down.

ECS control plane: $0 EKS control plane: $73/month per cluster

For a typical small deployment (4 services, 3 instances each):

ECS monthly: ~$214 total EKS monthly: ~$562 total

But that's just infrastructure. The real cost is your time:

ECS yearly (first year): $2,700 infrastructure + $16,200 operations + $2,000 learning = $20,900

EKS yearly (first year): $6,876 infrastructure + $64,800 operations + $15,000 learning + $2,400 upgrades = $89,076

That's $68,000 in the first year. These figures are based on internal tests and cost estimates for small teams using AWS Fargate. You could hire another senior engineer with that money instead of learning Kubernetes.

ECS integrates with AWS services like CloudWatch, IAM, and Amazon RDS out of the box, which makes monitoring and managing deployments easier.

Oh, and CloudWatch logging costs on EKS are brutal - one team reported $3,650 annually just for control plane logs. ECS application logs run $10-30/month.

ECS users love the simplicity but complain about hitting limits at scale. "ECS was just so easy, and then so hard" is a common theme. Pain points: vendor lock-in, limited flexibility, and log management.

EKS users acknowledge the power but warn everyone about complexity. The phrase "steep learning curve" shows up in literally every discussion. One Reddit comment: "EKS is significantly more expensive and significantly more complex to host Kubernetes infrastructure."

From a Medium post by an experienced team: They were "aware of warnings about Kubernetes becoming a 'White Elephant for a small team like ours'" but did it anyway for cost savings. After migration: CPU throttling issues, ingress controller bugs, continuous tuning required.

The brutal honest take from an EKS user: "where Azure and Google built Kubernetes-as-a-service around Kubernetes itself, AWS did it the other way around. EKS was (and in many ways still is) a patchwork around AWS concepts."

ECS: Check CloudWatch logs. Look at the ECS console. It tells you exactly what failed - OutOfMemory, health check failed, etc. Use tools you already know.

EKS: You need to know kubectl. You need to understand pod lifecycle states (Pending, ImagePullBackOff, CrashLoopBackOff). You need to debug across multiple layers - pods, services, ingress controllers, and node capacity. One team had "pods eating up too many resources, preventing observability agents from scheduling" - that's a problem that requires understanding Kubernetes internals to even diagnose.

ECS:

• Task definition versioning is clunky
• Internal service discovery used to require load balancers (mostly fixed now)
• API rate limits can bite you at scale.

EKS:

• Resource limits have "no general guideline" - you figure it out by trial and error
• The networking setup is complex, and AWS doesn't hold your hand
• You need both IAM AND Kubernetes RBAC configured correctly
• The load balancer controller isn't installed by default
• Pod count per node is limited by AWS ENI limits
• You can't skip Kubernetes versions during upgrades
• Rollback isn't possible if an upgrade breaks things.

EKS offers more control if you need things like custom networking, multi-cluster setups, or want to run workloads with EKS Anywhere. It’s better when you actually need deep container management.

Choose EKS if you have:

• Someone on the team who actually knows Kubernetes (6+ months of real experience)
• 50+ microservices with complex requirements
• Actual multi-cloud requirements (not "maybe someday")
• Compliance mandates requiring Kubernetes
• At least one full-time person who can own platform operations.

Otherwise, you're adopting complexity you don't need.

For 3–5 services without DevOps people: use ECS with AWS Fargate and skip the Kubernetes headache.

Here's why: Kubernetes becomes a project in itself. You end up spending more time managing the platform than building features. One engineer can handle ECS in a few hours a month. EKS needs someone focused on it nearly full-time.

How smart MadAppGang's crew handles scaling cloud development without burning the team, read in this article.

The $68,000 first-year difference isn't theoretical - that's real money you could spend hiring people or building product.

"But everyone uses Kubernetes!" Yeah, and everyone with dedicated platform teams. You don't have that. Use the boring technology that works and lets you ship features.

If you genuinely outgrow ECS later – managing 50+ services, need service mesh, have actual multi-cloud customers – you can migrate. Container portability makes that reasonable. But starting with EKS when you're not ready wastes 6-12 months learning platform operations instead of building a product.

Choose the tool that disappears. For small teams, that's ECS.

Both ECS and EKS live under the Amazon Elastic Container Service umbrella. Both are part of the broader AWS ecosystem for building, deploying, and scaling modern apps. They help you run stuff on the AWS Cloud without having to babysit infrastructure.

ECS is simpler, cheaper, and lets you focus on building your application. EKS is powerful but requires dedicated expertise and ongoing operational investment. At 3-5 services, the complexity of managing EKS exceeds the complexity of your actual workload.

ECS wins on ease of use. You don’t need to be a Kubernetes expert to deploy and scale a production app. If you're already using AWS, it makes sense to start with the simpler option. The key differences between EKS and ECS come down to complexity and control.

Start with ECS. Ship features. Migrate to EKS later if you actually need it. Your customers care about working software, not whether you're running Kubernetes or which container tech you choose — just that you choose the right one for your team.

Need help choosing your AWS stack? Let’s talk — we’ve built both ECS and EKS setups for clients of all sizes.