ECS/EKS Anywhere

Teams standardized on ECS or EKS want the same container tooling and workflows on-premises — but Outposts (AWS-owned hardware) is more than they need, and they already have their own servers and hypervisor. ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere solve this by letting you run the orchestrator software on infrastructure you own and manage:

• ECS Anywhere — register your on-prem (or other-cloud) VMs/bare-metal as external instances in an ECS cluster whose control plane still runs in AWS. You manage tasks with the same ECS API and console.
• EKS Anywhere — install and run a full Kubernetes cluster on your own hardware (built on the EKS Distro), managed locally with eksctl anywhere. It can run fully disconnected; an optional connector shows it in the EKS console.

• ECS Anywhere: the control plane is in an AWS Region; your external instances need outbound connectivity to it (via SSM Agent + ECS Agent). Tasks run wherever your servers physically are — no AWS AZ concept.
• EKS Anywhere: entirely on your infrastructure — control plane and workers both on-prem. It can operate with no connection to AWS at all; the EKS Connector only adds read-mostly visibility in the console.
• Both rely on your networking, storage, and hardware HA — AWS doesn’t provide an AZ or a rack here.

graph LR
subgraph DC["Your Data Center / hardware"]
  subgraph ECSA["ECS Anywhere"]
    EXT["External instances (SSM + ECS agent)"]
    T["ECS tasks"]
    EXT --> T
  end
  subgraph EKSA["EKS Anywhere"]
    LOCALK8S["Local Kubernetes cluster (EKS Distro)"]
  end
end
AWSCP["ECS control plane (AWS Region)"] <-->|"manages tasks"| EXT
EKSCONN["EKS Connector (optional)"] -.->|"read-only view"| LOCALK8S
classDef a fill:#e8f0fe,stroke:#3b82f6,stroke-width:2px,color:#173a70
classDef b fill:#f3ecfb,stroke:#8b3de0,stroke-width:2px,color:#3a1a5c
class EXT,T a
class LOCALK8S b

ECS Anywhere bills a small per-hour fee per registered external instance; you provide (and pay for) the hardware. EKS Anywhere is free to run on your own infrastructure (open-source EKS Distro); an optional EKS Anywhere Enterprise Subscription adds AWS support and curated add-ons per cluster per year. No AWS compute charges — the servers are yours.

• Decision order for on-prem containers: want AWS-owned managed hardware → Outposts; want your own hardware but AWS-managed ECS control plane → ECS Anywhere; want a self-managed Kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, possibly air-gapped → EKS Anywhere.
• ECS Anywhere keeps you in the ECS API/console; EKS Anywhere is standard kubectl against a cluster you operate.
• EKS Anywhere can run fully disconnected — the exam likes this for “air-gapped” or “no reliable internet” scenarios. ECS Anywhere needs a path back to its Region control plane.
• Both use Amazon ECR (or any registry) for images; EKS Distro is the same Kubernetes components AWS runs in EKS, packaged for self-hosting.
• External instances are registered and bootstrapped via AWS Systems Manager.