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Cloud Computing Tutorial · Compute · Lesson 12 of 24

Containers in the Cloud

Run containers on ECS, Fargate, EKS, Azure Container Apps, AKS, Cloud Run and GKE, and choose between them.

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Options from simplest to most flexible

Option AWS Azure Google Cloud
Run a container from an image, scale to zero App Runner Container Apps Cloud Run
Managed container orchestration without Kubernetes ECS (on Fargate or EC2) Container Apps Cloud Run
Managed Kubernetes EKS AKS GKE (Autopilot or Standard)
Serverless nodes for containers Fargate Virtual nodes / Container Instances GKE Autopilot

How to choose

  • Cloud Run / Container Apps / App Runner: a web service or worker from an image, with scaling handled for you. Fastest path for most stateless HTTP services.
  • ECS on Fargate: AWS-native, no servers or Kubernetes to manage, deep IAM integration.
  • Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE): many services, portability, a large ecosystem (Helm, operators, service mesh), or platform teams building an internal platform. More power, more to operate.
A simple decision helperTry it yourself
def recommend(services, team_knows_k8s, needs_k8s_ecosystem, scale_to_zero):
    if needs_k8s_ecosystem or (services > 30 and team_knows_k8s):
        return "managed Kubernetes (EKS / AKS / GKE)"
    if scale_to_zero:
        return "Cloud Run / Azure Container Apps / App Runner"
    return "ECS on Fargate (or Container Apps / Cloud Run)"

cases = [("startup API", 3, False, False, True), ("platform team", 60, True, True, False),
         ("internal workers", 8, False, False, False)]
for name, *args in cases:
    print(f"{name:16} -> {recommend(*args)}")

Output

startup API      -> Cloud Run / Azure Container Apps / App Runner
platform team    -> managed Kubernetes (EKS / AKS / GKE)
internal workers -> ECS on Fargate (or Container Apps / Cloud Run)

Whatever you choose: images in a private registry (ECR, ACR, Artifact Registry), workload identity instead of keys, health checks, logs to stdout, and resource sizing from measurements.

Test yourself

Which option runs containers on AWS without managing servers or Kubernetes?

  1. ECS on Fargate
  2. EKS with self-managed nodes
  3. EC2 with Docker installed by hand
  4. Lambda layers
Show answer

Answer: ECS on Fargate

Fargate runs ECS tasks (or EKS pods) without you managing any servers.

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