In today’s cloud-native world, containers are the new standard for deploying applications. But while containers solve many problems, managing the underlying infrastructure for them can still be a pain.

What if you could run your containers without managing servers, clusters, or scaling headaches?

That’s where AWS Fargate comes in.

What Is AWS Fargate?

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) and Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

With Fargate, you don’t need to provision or manage EC2 instances. You simply define your container image, resource requirements (CPU and memory), and AWS takes care of the rest — including scaling, patching, and load balancing.

Why Choose Fargate?

Here are some compelling reasons why AWS Fargate is worth considering:

1. No Server Management

You don’t have to choose instance types, manage clusters, or worry about scaling groups.

2. Pay-as-you-go

You only pay for the CPU and memory your containers use — no idle EC2 time!

3. Secure by Design

Each task or pod runs in its own isolated kernel — enhancing security compared to shared-node models.

4. ECS and EKS Support

Fargate integrates with both ECS and EKS, giving you flexibility whether you prefer native ECS or Kubernetes workflows.

Use Cases for AWS Fargate

1. Build and deploy your applications, APIs, and microservices architectures with the speed and immutability of containers. Remove the need to own, run, and manage the lifecycle of a compute infrastructure, so you can focus on your applications.

2. Use AWS Fargate with Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS to more easily run and scale your containerized workloads. Migrate and run your Amazon ECS Windows containers without refactoring or rearchitecting your legacy applications.

3. Create a flexible and portable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) development environment. Train, test, and deploy your ML models with scalable resources that boost server capacity while avoiding overprovisioning.

4. Run data processing workloads, scale up to 16 vCPU and 120 GB memory per task, and integrate with AWS Batch for serverless parallel processing.

Final Thoughts

AWS Fargate offers a perfect balance between developer productivity and operational simplicity. If you’re building container-based applications and want to avoid the overhead of infrastructure management, Fargate should be high on your list.

You focus on your code — Fargate takes care of the servers.