Amazon Elastic Beanstalk vs EC2 instance with docker containers

Question

If I understand correctly, Elastic Beanstalk creates an EC2 instance for each application you deploy. However, an application typically doesn't run at 100% CPU, yet amazon charges you per instance used. So if I deployed 5 apps with Dockerfiles, AWS would charge the usage of 5 EC2 instances per month.

With this in mind, can't I just simply launch an EC2, install docker and run my containers in there? Wouldn't that be much more cost-effective?

Answer 1

AWS offers a service called Elastic Beanstalk that comes with the EC2 container Service(ECS). EB supports multiple container Docker environments. So, an EB environment containing multiple instances in an autoscaling group can run multiple containers per instances. And these containers are managed by through ECS agent and its API.

You can refer to the following link for more information.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_docker_ecstutorial.html