AWS Containers Consulting

AWS has several container services—we commonly recommend Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). EKS is great for orchestrating Kubernetes clusters and when you need additional level of flexibility and control for your container strategy. ECS is a fully managed service for handling your docker clusters, and a bit simpler than EKS but with many of the same benefits. Fargate is for serverless compute in a containerized environment. And ECR helps you maintain a repository of images you can use for these services and other serverless environments, like AWS Lambda.

You think of your apps and services as living on a factory assembly line that keeps them running, updates them, and deploys them. Some factories operate by having people handle each part of the process, even assembling things by hand if necessary. Kubernetes is the automated version of that assembly line, where everything that doesn’t require human intervention is gracefully configured and automated away. This helps ensure:

• Reliability: If a part of your app breaks, Kubernetes on AWS can fix it automatically, even by re-deploying if necessary.
• Scalability: If more people visit your website, Kubernetes can handle it by making sure enough resources are available.
• Efficiency: Instead of you manually managing where and how your apps run, Kubernetes on AWS automates it, saving time and avoiding errors.

In our factory analogy, Kubernetes like having a fully automated assembly line for your digital products on AWS! You can produce faster, scale faster, and update faster, and all with an absolute minimum of human effort.

Docker ensures that software runs the same way, no matter where it's running. In a traditional deployment strategy, you’d have to ensure your OS was up-to-date, any vulnerabilities patched, and your application was compatible with all underlying infrastructure and dependencies. On top of that, you have to exercise a lot of operational diligence and perform regular maintenance for security and stability. 

With Docker, you enable that work via configuration—a Docker image specifies your application’s environment and dependencies to make deploying seamlessly consistent. Updating your environment becomes a matter of updating your configuration, the Docker file.

• Consistency: Docker ensures software runs consistently across different environments.
• Isolation: Docker keeps software and its dependencies isolated from the system it's running on.
• Portability: Docker allows you to easily move and share software across different systems.

So, Docker ensures your software "recipe" works perfectly everywhere!

If you find yourself running into issues where your applications perform inconsistently in different environments (like development offline versus production in the cloud) that’s a strong indicator you should consider a container strategy. Containerizing is about removing variables that might influence app behavior, create hard-to-find bugs, or make performance inconsistent. It can also be a matter of team size and market: for smaller projects, a full-fledged container orchestration strategy might be overkill. But as you scale, containers become critical to development velocity, reliability, and security.

They can be used in related contexts, but they aren’t quite the same thing. Here's the distinction:

• Containers: A technology that packages an application and its required environment to ensure it runs uniformly across different computing environments.
• Microservices: An architectural approach where an application is composed of small, independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs.

So while they are distinct, containers and microservices work well together. Containers provide an excellent environment for deploying individual microservices since they ensure consistency and isolation, which is why they are often mentioned in the same breath as microservices. However, one can use a microservices approach to building applications without adopting containers, and containers can house applications that aren't microservices.