-> ECS locks you into AWS
LocalOps frees you to deploy app environments powered by open Kubernetes standard across AWS, GCP and Azure and ensures same developer experience across all of them.
-> ECS Fargate compute is more expensive
LocalOps provisions AWS Managed EC2 Node Groups for compute. EC2 is at least 33% more cheaper than Fargate for most workload. Also, ECS Fargate charges a flat fee per vCPU and GB memory which isn't efficient at all compared to EC2 at any scale.
-> ECS needs you to buy & manually set up CloudWatch or other 3rd party observability tools such as DataDog, NewRelic on each ECS cluster to see logs, metrics and traces
LocalOps has built-in observability in each app environment using open source Prometheus/Grafana stack.
You can stop paying for 3rd party observability tools as everything is pre-configured in LocalOps using open source monitoring tools.
-> ECS doesn't provide out of the box continuous deployments in its clusters. Must be setup separately using AWS Code deploy or using IaC tools like Terraform
LocalOps has built-in automation to setup git based continuous deployments in every environment it creates.
-> ECS doesn’t have “environment” abstraction as defined by 12factor apps specification until you automate and define specific resources using IaC tools
LocalOps comes with in-built environment abstraction that can group together cloud resources - network, compute instances, volumes etc., and handle them all as one unit - Environments. You can spin up new environments in few clicks.
-> ECS expects you to have Docker images in ECR to make deployments
LocalOps can setup the docker-build stages and work just with Dockerfiles in your git repo.
-> ECS clusters will not enforce consistency amongst different clusters until you make it that way via IaC tools like Terraform/Pulumi
LocalOps ensures consistency amongst all app environments it provisions and you can spin up 5, 10, 15 identical environments across any number of cloud accounts, regions, environments and customers.