Top 5 features of Elastigroup for Amazon ECS

Introduction

One of the blog posts that made the most impact on me was Werner’s post about Amazon ECS — Under the hood.

Amazon’s CTO explains in his blog about the two key components of running modern distributed applications on a cluster: reliable state management using a Paxos-based transactional journal based data store that keeps a record of every change made to data entry and flexible scheduling which Amazon ECS is pretty awesome at. These two components make Amazon ECS as one of the leading containers schedulers out there, especially if you are an AWS customer.

In my opinion, this is the easiest and most simple way to run a production-grade containers workload today.

In the past 18 months, we’ve experienced exponential growth, month over month of customers using Amazon ECS. An interesting fact here, the growth kept coming from both new and existing customers, who started to use Amazon ECS, and continued to deploy more and more capacity over time in ECS since it was so easy and a no-brainer for them.

In this blog post, I’d like to highlight the main reasons that Amazon ECS customers have chosen Spotinst Elastigroup to manage their underlying EC2 infrastructure, deploy their services faster, optimize their clusters and manage their container costs.

1. Advanced Cluster Auto Scaling & Instances Auto Provisioning

As you deploy Tasks and Services using the Amazon ECS CLI, API or Console UI, Spotinst Elastigroup scales the number of instances in the cluster to meet your application demand.
Sounds easy right? Well, not really.
Spotinst Elastigroup learns what resources (CPU, Memory, Ports) your Tasks need and decides what is the best instance size or type to accommodate those requirements.

2. 90% Resource Utilization

Containers are first-class citizens in Amazon ECS clusters. Spotinst Elastigroup studies the actual Containers requirements and matches ECS Tasks and Services with the most efficient and optimized mix of EC2 Instances, making sure the instances are highly utilized, which is extremely difficult to implement and track at scale.

3. Up to 80% Less of EC2 costs via reliable use of EC2 Spot, Reserved and On-Demand Instances

Spotinst Elastigroup reliably utilizes EC2 Spot Instances capacity to save up to 80% of the infrastructure for cost, with enterprise-grade SLA.

4. Cost Management for Containers

Spotisnt Elastigroup lets you track your ECS cluster costs by Services, Applications, and Tasks. Using a show-back calculation algorithm (to allocate the costs of your VMs to the usage of the actual container) Elastigroup provides deep visibility inside each Task and container across compute, networking and storage costs.

5. Enterprise-grade SLA

Spotinst Elastigroup automates Amazon ECS’ infrastructure provisioning and management at scale to reduce the risk of human errors and discover failures before they happen. In addition, Elastigroup uses historical and real-time data of EC2 Spot Instances interruption to replace Spot Instances ahead of time in order to maintain your Services, Tasks and Application availability.

How to get started

If you haven’t already tried Spotinst Elastigroup for Amazon ECS, here are a few quick ways to take it for a spin.

1. Fully automated Quick Start using Amazon Cloud Formation stack built by the AWS & Spotinst team.
   https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/spotinst-elastigroup/
2. Import an existing ECS cluster using our getting started guide
   https://spot.io/getting-started/ecs-on-spot/