AWS says you can run Docker using EC2, ECS, or Elastic Beanstalk. The common denominator for these three platforms is that they utilize EC2 instances requiring uniformly-sized instances. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to mix and match instance sizes in your fleet? Mixed instance sizes are useful when employing cost-management strategies such as reservations and spot instances. Mesosphere’s DC/OS along with Marathon offers the potential of consolidating your instance fleet into a block of computing that you can run long-running Dockerized web applications with.

By decoupling the containers from instances, instances can be provisioned based on cost without having to worry about sizing. In this presentation, we’ll evaluate Marathon running on DC/OS as a replacement for Elastic Beanstalk and/or ECS in terms of functionality, ease of use as well as cost.