What is the basic difference between ECS service vs Task?

 In the context of AWS, in your given scenario if you have a web-based application that needs to be handled at varying levels of traffic throughout the day, then you can choose ECS service over Task in the context of ECS service vs task for this particular project.

The ECS Service is famous for providing a higher level abstraction for managing containers as compared to the ECS task. If you choose ECS Service over ECS task you would get your defined desired task count, the definition of the task, and even loading balancing Configuration, which would allow you to handle the scaling of tasks based on the desired count and the associated load balancer’s metrics.

Here is a simplified example of how you can define an ECS service by using the command line interface of AWS:-

Aws ecs create-service –cluster my-cluster –service-name my-service 
  --task-definition my-task-definition –desired-count 3 
  --load-balancers targetGroupArn=my-target-group-arn,containerName=my-container,containerPort=80 
  --launch-type EC2

Thus command would create an ECS service whose name would be “my service” within the cluster of “my cluster” by using the task definition of “my task definition” with a desired count of 3 tasks. It will also help you in associating the service with a target group for load balancing.

 By using the ECS service in this particular scenario provided by you, you can get easier management of scaling and load balancing compared to manual management of individual tasks with ECS tasks.