ECS vs EKS: Which AWS Container Service Should You Use?

#aws #ecs #eks #comparison

ECS vs EKS — two ways to run containers on AWS. One charges $0 for the control plane. One charges $73/mo per cluster.

I spent a week researching this and built a full comparison page with verified pricing, a cost calculator, and real operational math. Here's the TL;DR.

The short answer

Choose ECS if you need containers without owning Kubernetes — no control plane bill, no node management, no cluster upgrades every 14 months.

Choose EKS if you need the Kubernetes ecosystem (operators, Helm, multi-cloud) and have a platform team to run it.

The real difference isn't the $73

That's the least interesting number. What actually matters:

Operational load: ECS ~0.1 FTE (Terraform + monitoring). EKS ~0.5–2.0 FTE (upgrades, addons, RBAC, Helm, node patching).
Scale-up speed: ECS Fargate 30–90s (no nodes to provision). EKS with Karpenter 60–150s. Cluster Autoscaler 3–5 min.
Off-hours: ECS stops to $0. EKS keeps billing $73 control plane + minimum node costs even with zero workloads.
Bin-packing: EC2 instances waste 15–30% capacity. Fargate bills per vCPU/GB-second — zero waste.