Advantages of creating ECS cluster inside a VPC

Question

What are the advantages of creating ECS cluster inside a VPC? I see that in the console page, it asks for whether one wants to create the ECS cluster inside the VPC or not?

Answer 1

Of course the right answer for your question is: it depends.

There could be many reasons to have you ECS cluster in an existing VPC, eg because that VPC is reserved to your development resources and you are creating your ECS cluster for dev or the VPC is paired with another one and you want to allow the ECS pods to be able to access the paired network resources.

For the opposite reasons maybe you want to have the ECS in a separated VPC. Of course the documentation can help you to make a decision.

The question in the console page is more about do you have already a VPC for this cluster or do you want me to create one for you? Let's say you are creating a new ECS cluster and you need a separated VPC, but you don't want to bother creating a new one, you can just leave this task to the AWS console.