Fargate

Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows you to run containers without managing the underlying server infrastructure or cluster, and it is designed to work with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). With Fargate, users specify resource requirements for their containers rather than provisioning and maintaining compute capacity.

In ECS, Fargate handles provisioning, scaling, and isolation of the compute resources for each task. In EKS, Fargate runs Kubernetes pods on demand. Each Fargate task or pod is deployed in its own isolated environment and receives its own elastic network interface in the Virtual Private Cloud, enabling control over networking with security groups and IAM roles for tasks.

Pricing for Fargate is based on the vCPU and memory resources allocated to tasks and is billed on a per-second basis with a minimum one-minute charge. This model supports automatic scaling and reduces operational overhead by removing the need to manage server fleets. Common use cases include microservices, REST APIs, event-driven processing, and batch workloads where administrators want to avoid managing infrastructure.

Limitations and considerations include feature gaps relative to self-managed EC2 deployments, potential constraints on CPU/memory combinations, and certain storage or GPU options that may differ from traditional clusters. Proper configuration of IAM roles, security groups, and VPC networking is essential to enforce isolation and access controls.

Overall, Fargate positions itself as a serverless alternative within AWS’s container platform, complementing ECS and EKS by removing the burden of server management for many containerized workloads.