ECS Anywhere

ECS Anywhere is an extension (a feature) of Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) that allows you to run and manage container workloads on your own infrastructure, outside of AWS data centers. Here are the key points about ECS Anywhere:

1. Extended reach: It enables you to run ECS tasks on any infrastructure, including on-premises servers, virtual machines, or edge devices.

2. Consistent management: You can use the same ECS APIs, CLI commands, and console to manage containers across different environments.

3. Hybrid and edge computing: It's particularly useful for hybrid cloud setups and edge computing scenarios where you need to run workloads closer to your data sources or users.

4. AWS integration: Despite running outside AWS, ECS Anywhere still integrates with other AWS services like CloudWatch for monitoring and IAM for access control.

5. Reduced complexity: It simplifies container orchestration by providing a consistent experience across diverse infrastructure.

6. Cost-effective: You can leverage existing infrastructure investments while still benefiting from ECS's container management capabilities.

7. Security: It maintains AWS-level security practices even when running on your own infrastructure.

ECS Anywhere is particularly beneficial for organizations that need to maintain certain workloads on-premises due to regulatory requirements, latency concerns, or existing infrastructure investments, while still wanting to leverage the benefits of cloud-native container orchestration.

Requirements are:

• You must have the SSM Agent, ECS agent, and Docker installed.

• You must first register external instances as SSM Managed Instances.

• Easily create and installation script within the ECS console.

• Scripts contain SSM activation keys and commands for required software.

• Execute scripts on on-premises VMs or bare-metal servers.

• To deploy containers you to need to use the EXTERNAL launch type within Amazon ECS.