github.com/anth0d/nomad@v0.0.0-20221214183521-ae3a0a2cad06/website/content/intro/vs/ecs.mdx (about) 1 --- 2 layout: intro 3 page_title: Nomad vs. AWS ECS 4 description: Comparison between Nomad and AWS ECS 5 --- 6 7 # Nomad vs. AWS ECS 8 9 Amazon Web Services provides the Elastic Container Service (ECS), which is 10 a cluster manager. The ECS service is only available within AWS and 11 can only be used for Docker workloads. Amazon provides customers with 12 the agent that is installed on EC2 instances, but does not provide 13 the servers which are a hosted service of AWS. 14 15 There are a number of fundamental differences between Nomad and ECS. 16 Nomad is completely open source, including both the client and server 17 components. By contrast, only the agent code for ECS is open and 18 the servers are closed sourced and managed by Amazon. 19 20 As a side effect of the ECS servers being managed by AWS, it is not possible 21 to use ECS outside of AWS. Nomad is agnostic to the environment in which it is run, 22 supporting public and private clouds, as well as bare metal datacenters. 23 Clusters in Nomad can span multiple datacenters and regions, meaning 24 a single cluster could be managing machines on AWS, Azure, and GCE simultaneously. 25 26 The ECS service is specifically focused on containers and the Docker 27 engine, while Nomad is more general purpose. Nomad supports virtualized, 28 containerized, and standalone applications, including Docker. Nomad is 29 designed with extensible drivers and support will be extended to all 30 common drivers.