Containers 101 — Docker, ECS and EKS
Six diagrams that take a room from “what is a container” to picking a compute mode on purpose. Work through them in order.
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1
How a container actually runs
Docker platform. The CLI,
dockerd,containerd,runc, and the kernel features that do the isolating. -
2
From Dockerfile to a dead container
Container lifecycle. Created, running, paused, exited, OOMKilled, removed — and why an exited container still costs you disk.
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3
One control plane, five places to run
Amazon ECS. Task definitions, services, and the AWS-managed scheduler that fans work out to five compute modes.
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4
Who manages what
ECS compute modes. Express Mode, Fargate, Managed Instances, ECS on EC2 and ECS Anywhere, side by side.
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5
Managed Kubernetes, your data plane
Amazon EKS. The control-plane split, how you get nodes, the VPC CNI, and how pods get AWS credentials.
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6
Which compute should this container use?
Decision guide. Five questions, six answers. Use it as the closing exercise.