AWS ECS Anywhere goes live. Is it worth the Amazon fee?

ECS Anywhere, which enables on-premises or Edge container applications to be managed by AWS, is now generally available. The Elastic Container Service is the AWS alternative to Kubernetes for container orchestration. AWS also offers EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), but ECS is easier to use and tightly integrated to other AWS …

[standbythree]

So - correct me if I'm wrong here - I can buy a server with my own money, power it and maintain it, and pay Amazon BY THE HOUR to run my own software on it?

Is this the real world?

[Korev]

Do try to contain your enthusiasm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spare a thought and a bit of coin for Jeff. Superyachts are expensive.

[Anonymous Coward]

all 3 Fs in fact

Not only the superyacht, but also helicopters and Ms Sanchez. The man who made a fortune convincing people to buy stock in a company that rents stuff out without making a profit has ended up buying all three things one really ought to rent. Small wonder he's skint enough to try leasing you your own computers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: all 3 Fs in fact

Wake up. Amazon is way past the not making money stage. They make Billions.

[Muppet Boss]

>pay Amazon BY THE HOUR to run my own software on it?

Pay $0.01 by the hour to run some software (Amazon may giggle about the 'your' part), plus pay $0.05 by the hour for the site-to-site VPN connection, plus pay $0.09 per each out (from Amazon) GB of traffic. You have to pay to stay high.

[Missing Semicolon]

Yet it is actually pointless

One of the reasons for running on-prem is privacy. But with an always on VPN to AWS, your data is always subject to subpoena from the USA.

[Dan 55]

Re: Yet it is actually pointless

And you can't just use the open source software that Amazon has appropriated, because it's also got the propriety AWS gubbins stuck in there too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet it is actually pointless

You don't need an always-on VPN to run ECS Anywhere workloads, the agent you install on local hardware connects outbound to AWS's APIs over TLS.

If you were using ECS Anywhere, you're probably about as open to having data stored on your own hardware subpoenaed by the US as if you had any piece of software that phones home to the US installed - because that's effectively all that the ECS Anywhere agent is doing...

Also, if you're in the UK or the EU, you can connect VPNs directly to endpoints owned by AWS EMEA SARL, not the US entity, which goes a little way towards mitigating Uncle Sam's reach.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: Yet it is actually pointless

AWS EMEA SARL == Amazon US, from the point of view of the CLOUD Act.

[RobLang]

This feels like another step toward meta-cloud. It's another step after "not my computer", it's more like "I don't care where it runs, I have a domain name and a dockerfile". Cloud is gradually moving from commodity to utility.

[Abominator]

Okay, increasingly there are vendor products that were onsite, but have switched to SaaS but with a second tier to run in your own containerised environment that is geared towards AWS.

So this lets you run those products in your own data center and make it look like AWS.

Again, privacy here is the theme. Don't put your customer data in small to medium SaaS platform vendor. Why as security and supply chain attacks are now increasingly common attack vectors.