Chef & Puppet vs. ECS / EKS

Question

What is the difference between using Chef and/or Puppet to administer applications and infrastructure on AWS versus containerization with ECS and EKS.

I'm pretty familiar with ECS and somewhat familiar with EKS, but I have zero knowledge of Chef and Puppet outside of knowing their names and reading for about 5 minutes on their respective websites.

Would someone please provide a simple, concise explanation of the differences between Chef/Puppet and ECS/EKS, along with example usages of Chef/Puppet vs. containerization?

Accepted Answer

These are different things. Chef/Puppet are configuration management systems used to build/manage/deploy applications and infrastructure including container images and containers. ECS/EKS are container platforms where you would run/schedule your container images to be executed and provide a service/function. So as a very basic example specific to containers,

Build container images: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. Deploy container images: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. Run and schedule container: ECS, EKS, AKS, GKE, PKS, OpenShift, etc.

Build container images: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc.
Deploy container images: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc.
Run and schedule container: ECS, EKS, AKS, GKE, PKS, OpenShift, etc.

Answer

As mentioned by another user: Chef and Puppet are Configuration Management tools, while ECS/EKS are Container Orchestration tools.

You can create a Chef recipe to, for example, setup and configure an ECS Task Definition, but not the other way around

Chef & Puppet vs. ECS / EKS

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