Amazon EC2 Container Service Amazon Elastic Container Service
Fully managed container orchestration service for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications on AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, and on-premises infrastructure.
Naming timeline
- Amazon EC2 Container Service
Launched in preview on November 13, 2014 and reached general availability on April 9, 2015 as a managed Docker container orchestration service for Amazon EC2 clusters.
- Amazon Elastic Container ServiceCurrent name
Rebranded from Amazon EC2 Container Service to Amazon Elastic Container Service (retaining the Amazon ECS acronym) alongside the launch of AWS Fargate serverless container compute.
What is Amazon EC2 Container Service called now?
Amazon EC2 Container Service is now called Amazon Elastic Container Service, with the latest change on 29 November 2017 (AWS re:Invent 2017). Fully managed container orchestration service for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications on AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, and on-premises infrastructure. Only the customer-facing name changed; the underlying technical identifiers remain backward compatible.
Also known as
- ECS
Technical identifiers
Technical identifiers unchanged. Only the customer-facing product name changed; the APIs, CLI commands, IAM roles and Terraform resources below keep their legacy identifiers for backward compatibility.
| AWS Service APIs / SDKs | ecs |
|---|---|
| AWS CLI Commands | aws ecs |
| IAM Actions & Policies | ecs:* |
| Terraform Resources (aws_*) | aws_ecs_cluster aws_ecs_service aws_ecs_task_definition aws_ecs_capacity_provider |
Because the rebrand preserved the 'ECS' acronym, all API endpoints (ecs.<region>.amazonaws.com), CLI commands (aws ecs), IAM actions (ecs:*), and Terraform resources (aws_ecs_*) remained identical.
Notes & disambiguation
- At AWS re:Invent 2017 (November 29, 2017), AWS introduced AWS Fargate as a serverless compute engine for containers and changed the 'E' in ECS from 'EC2' to 'Elastic' because ECS clusters were no longer restricted to running on Amazon EC2 instances.
- All programmatic identifiers—including the service acronym (Amazon ECS), API namespace (ecs), AWS CLI subcommand (aws ecs), IAM action prefix (ecs:*), CloudFormation resources (AWS::ECS::*), and Terraform resources (aws_ecs_*)—remained unchanged.
- Distinct from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which was previewed on the same day at re:Invent 2017 under the preliminary name 'Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes' before adopting the shorter name Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Sources & official documentation
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