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I'm new to these both technologies but have trouble understanding what exactly do these two do different, a use case example will be very helpful.

Apoorv Bedmutha
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AWS ECS is the container orchestration service that allows deployment, scale of the containers. Let's say you have 10 apps to be deployed on EC2 machines. ECS will provide you an easy way to deploy and manage them, scale the app when needed etc.

Now, these 10 apps might want to talk to each other. One way is to use the ip address and make an RPC call to the other application. However, this process doesn't scale. What if the machine is restarted or the app or the app is moved to another EC2 machine etc.

So, you require a middleware that manages the mapping of app to the EC2 machine so that the application doesn't need to bother about how to call the other application.

AWS AppMesh provides exactly that middleware. It provides an application level networking so that your service can communicate with other services.

Avishek Bhattacharya
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  • Okay Now I get it thanks, so appMesh knows where each container / ec2 instance is so as when one instance needs to communicate with another, appMesh makes the connection without any issues. – Apoorv Bedmutha Jan 04 '22 at 06:39
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    Yes, appMesh knows where everyone is and how to communicate to them. It abstracts the service to service communication process. – Avishek Bhattacharya Jan 04 '22 at 09:14
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ECS - Platform to run containers as task/service in a clustered manner.

when multiple containers are running in an ecs cluster they may want to talk with each other OR other aws services. These containers should know where other containers/services are by means of ip/endpoint..etc. That's where service discovery comes into picture.

Appmesh - Appmesh is a service discovery tool plus a lot more feature. One of them is to ensuring reliable communication between containers.

  • Appmesh uses envoy as sidecar in ecs to implement service discovery(plus many more) functionality.
  • Most of the time Appmesh is used in conjunction with Aws CloudMap.
imtiyaz283
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