Amazon Announces Amazon Elastic Container Service Anywhere

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This past May 2021, Amazon announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere.  While most organizations are looking to run their containerized workloads in the cloud, there are circumstances where they might also want to run them on-premise. That can create problems because managing your container workloads in the cloud and on-premise have traditionally required totally different management platforms with completely different experiences and requirements.

Amazon ECS Anywhere is designed to provide a constant container management experience across both the cloud and on-premise. Amazon ECS Anywhere is a fully managed container orchestration service that enables businesses to run and manage on-premise containerized applications using the same APIs, cluster management, workload scheduling, monitoring, and deployment pipelines that they would use if they were running the containers in the Amazon cloud. Businesses who need to keep their data on-premises for latency or regulatory reasons can use Amazon ECS Anywhere to get a consistent management experience for their container-based applications either on-premise or in the cloud.

You can use ECS Anywhere with any VM including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or OpenStack or on a bare-metal server running a supported Operating System. The ECS agent that allows a host to connect with the ECS control plane is supported on the long-term support (LTS) releases of Amazon Linux 2, Bottlerocket, Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, Debian, CentOS, and Fedora.

Each managed ECS Anywhere on-premises instance costs $0.01025 per hour. An on-premises instance is a customer-managed instance that has been registered with an Amazon ECS cluster and runs the Amazon ECS container agent. Pricing is based on the number of hours ECS Anywhere manages an on-premises instance. Charges begin when you register the instance with ECS Anywhere and continue until the instance is deregistered. There is a minimum charge of 1 minute per instance. To get a better idea of how this applies to different situations Amazon provided a couple of quick pricing examples:

  • Example 1: 100 on-premise instances that you manage with ECS Anywhere — Each instance has been connected to ECS for 50 hours and 1 minute. You will be charged at a rate of $0.01025 per hour.
  • Example 2: 10 on-premise instances that are connected to an Amazon ECS cluster for 30 days continuously. You also have one Amazon EC2 instance and one AWS Fargate instance — You will be billed for using the 10 on-premise instances at a rate of $0.01025 per hour. The Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate instances will be billed using the standard infrastructure charges.

Amazon ECS Anywhere is now available across 23 AWS Regions. Additional availability will be added to more Regions in the future. You can learn more at Amazon ECS Anywhere.