AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine that allows developers to run and scale container workloads. Moreover, they can focus on building applications, not on managing the underlying infrastructure. The service is compatible with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Read on to know the benefits of AWS Fargate and its (very few) limitations.

Benefits of AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate offers many benefits which are highlighted below:

No need to manage infrastructure

AWS Fargate eliminates the operational overhead associated with scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers. It “abstracts” the underlying infrastructure so teams can run containers without thinking about the burden of managing servers and clusters.

Launch containers quickly

With AWS Fargate, containers can be launched in seconds. All developers need to do is specify the resources they need and upload the container image. AWS Fargate will do the rest of the heavy lifting to launch containers quickly.

Monitor application performance

Developers can effortlessly monitor applications via built-in integrations with AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights. They can even gather metrics with third-party tools to continually assess application performance.

Transparent pricing for better cost control

AWS Fargate offers pay-as-you-go pricing and scales the serverless compute to match enterprise resource requirements. It thus minimizes the risk of over-provisioning and the need to pay for additional servers or resources.

Useful for a wide range of use cases

AWS Fargate is suitable for many different use cases. For example, organizations can build and deploy web apps, APIs, and microservices. They can also run and scale containerized data processing workloads.

Limitations of AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate offers numerous benefits as we have already seen. However, it also has a (few) limitations. One is that when using EKS or ECS on Fargate, there will be a trade-off with some configurability and advanced features. Also, configuring EKS or ECS on Fargate is slightly more expensive compared to self-managing the compute.

It’s also slightly difficult to understand the cost of containerized workloads at a granular level. Fortunately, a competent cloud consulting company like Axcess.io can help organizations gain better visibility into cloud costs so they can make more informed decisions as they leverage AWS Fargate.

Conclusion

AWS Fargate is very useful for organizations that:

• Are struggling with auto-scaling ECS tasks
• Are just getting started with container technology
• Tend to end up with a lot of unused but still-chargeable CPU or memory resources
• Have tasks that run on-demand and don’t require a dedicated EC2 instance
• Are looking to lower compute costs

All these organizations can capture these benefits by onboarding an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner like Axcess.io. The best partners know what it takes to capture all the benefits of serverless computing and AWS Fargate while increasing visibility and control into container costs.