To CaaS or Not to CaaS?
Compare the favorable functionalities of CaaS among Google, AWS, and Azure.
We'll cover the following...
How to decide?
Should we use managed Containers as a Service? That must be the most crucial question we should try to answer. Unfortunately, it’s hard to provide a universal answer since the solutions differ significantly from one provider to another. Currently (July 2020), CaaS can be described as a Wild West, with solutions ranging from amazing to useless.
Before we attempt to answer this big question, let’s go through some of the things we learned by exploring Google Cloud Run, AWS ECS with Fargate, and Azure Container Instances.
AWS, Google, or Azure?
We can compare those three from different angles.
Simplicity
Ease of use is one of the most essential benefits of serverless computing. It’s supposed to allow engineers to provide code or binaries (in one form or another) with a reasonable expectation that the platform of choice will do most of the rest of the work.
From a simplicity perspective, both Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Instances are exceptional. They allow us to deploy our container images without almost any initial setup:
- Google needs only a project.
- Azure requires only a resource group.
On the other hand, AWS needs over twenty different bits and pieces (resources) to be assembled before we can even start thinking about deploying something to ECS. Even after all the infrastructure is set up, we need to create a task definition, a service, and a container definition. If simplicity is what we’re looking for, ECS is not it.
It’s horrifyingly complicated, and it’s far from the “give us a container image, we’ll take care of the rest” approach we're all looking for when switching to serverless deployments. Surprisingly, a company that provides such an amazing Functions as a Service solution (Lambda) didn't do something similar with ECS. If AWS took the same approach with ECS as ...