Vlad Ionescu's Blog

Scaling containers on AWS in 2022

2022-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

This all started with a blog post back in 2020, from a tech curiosity: what's the fastest way to scale containers on AWS? Is ECS faster than EKS? What about Fargate? Is there a difference between ECS on Fargate and EKS on Fargate? I had to know this to build better architectures for my clients.

In 2021, containers got even better, and I was lucky enough to get a preview and present just how fast they got at re:Invent!

What about 2022? What's next in the landscape of scaling containers? Did the previous trends continue? How will containers scale this year? What about Lambda? We now have the answer!

Hand-drawn-style graph showing how long it takes to scale from 0 to 3500 containers: Lambda instantly spikes to 3000 and then jumps to 3500, ECS on Fargate starts scaling after 30 seconds and reaches close to 3500 around the four and a half minute mark, EKS on Fargate starts scaling after about a minute and reaches close to 3500 around the eight and a half minute mark, EKS on EC2 starts scaling after two and a half minutes and reaches 3500 around the six and a half minute mark, and ECS on EC2 starts scaling after two and a half minutes and reaches 3500 around the ten minute mark

Tl;dr:

Fargate is now faster than EC2
ECS on Fargate improved so much and is the perfect example for why offloading engineering effort to AWS is a good idea
ECS on Fargate using Windows containers is surprisingly fast
App Runner is on the way to becoming a fantastic service
Up to a point, EKS on Fargate is faster than EKS on EC2
EKS on EC2 scales faster when using karpenter rather than cluster-autoscaler, even in the worst possible scenario
EKS on EC2 is a tiny bit faster when using IPv6
Lambda with increased limits scales ridiculously fast

Beware, this benchmark is extremely specific and meant to provide a frame of reference, not completely accurate results — the focus here is making informed architectural decisions, not on squeezing out the most performance!

That's it! If you want to get more insights or if you want details about how I tested all this, continue reading on https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/scaling-containers-on-aws-in-2022/

Flowchart: How should I run containers on AWS?

2021-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Writing blog posts is hard, so I made a flowchart!

I only wanted to post this on Twitter, but the accessibility text could not fit. This blog post is for folks with vision impairment or low vision. Accessibility matters!

See the charts on Twitter or continue reading on https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/flowchart-how-should-i-run-containers-on-aws-2021/

Scaling containers on AWS in 2021

2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

For the 2021 results, there is no blog post: I got to present the results at re:Invent! You can watch the talk on YouTube

Accidentally a hacker

2020-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Around the beginning of February 2020, GitHub Security updated their public security disclosures and hacker leaderboard, and this happened:

GitHub leaderboard as of June 2020

Previously, on October 7, 2019, something popped up on HackerOne:

HackerOne bounty

This is the story of how it all came to be. Unlikely to ever have a sequel. Continue reading on https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/how-i-became-a-hacker/

Scaling containers on AWS in 2020

2020-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

This all started with a tech curiosity: what's the fastest way to scale containers on AWS? Is ECS faster than EKS? What about Fargate? Is there a difference between Fargate on ECS and Fargate on EKS?

For the fiscally responsible person in me, there is another interesting side to this. Does everybody have to bear the complexities of EKS? Where is the line? Say for a job that must finish in less than 1 hour and that on average uses 20.000 vCPUs and 50.000 GBs, what is the cost-efficient option considering the ramp-up time?

The final results

Tl;dr:

Fargate on ECS scales up 1 single Service at a surprisingly consistent 23 containers per minute
Fargate on ECS scales up multiple Services at 60 containers per minute as per the default AWS Limit
Fargate on EKS scales up at 60 containers per minute, regardless of the number of Deployments
Fargate scales up the same way, no matter if it's running on ECS or EKS
Fargate on EKS scales down significantly faster
Fargate limits can be increased for relevant workloads, significantly improving performance
Fargate starts scaling with a burst of 10 containers in the first second
EKS does have a delay of 1-2 minutes before it starts scaling up. The kube-scheduler has to do some magic, cluster-autoscaler has to decide what nodes to add, and so on. Fargate starts scaling up immediately
EKS scales up suuuper fast

Beware, this benchmark is utterly useless for web workloads — the focus here is on background work or batch processing. For a scaling benchmark relevant to web services, you can check out Clare Liguori's awesome demo at re:Invent 2019.

That's it! If you want to check out details about how I tested this, read more on https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/scaling-containers-in-aws/

Fixing EKS DNS

2019-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

I got to blog on the AWS Containers Blog: EKS DNS at scale and spikeiness! 🎉 I usually just get to mentor people, and they get to post stuff publicly, so this is a nice change! The AWS Containers Blog now seems to be missing my blog post, you can read a copy on my website. Read more on https://www.vladionescu.me/posts/eks-dns/