Overview

When you want to run containerized applications in the cloud, you typically need to manage servers (called container hosts) that run your containers. This involves choosing server sizes, monitoring capacity, and handling server updates and security. Fargate removes this complexity.

With Fargate, you simply package your application in a container, specify the memory and CPU requirements, and AWS handles everything else. It's like having an invisible server that perfectly fits your container's needs.

Fargate automatically scales your application based on demand, and you only pay for the exact compute resources your containers use while they're running. There's no need to pay for idle servers or worry about capacity planning.

The service integrates seamlessly with other AWS container services like Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) and Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), making it a flexible choice for running containerized applications.

Example uses

Web Applications: Run your web application containers without managing servers. Fargate automatically handles scaling as traffic increases or decreases.
Batch Processing: Run periodic data processing jobs in containers. Fargate only charges you for the time your processing container actually runs.
Microservices: Deploy multiple small, containerized services that can scale independently. Each service runs in isolation without sharing underlying infrastructure.
API Backend Services: Host API services in containers that can automatically scale based on request volume, without managing the infrastructure.

Integration with other AWS services

Fargate works well with many common AWS services:

Amazon ECS/EKS: Run containers using either Amazon's container orchestration service or Kubernetes
ELB Application Load Balancer: Distribute traffic across multiple container instances
Amazon ECR: Store your container images in AWS's container registry
AmazonCloudWatch: Monitor your container logs and metrics
EC2 Auto Scaling: Automatically adjust the number of containers based on demand

Think of Fargate as the "serverless" way to run containers, similar to how Lambda is the serverless way to run functions. It's ideal when you want the flexibility of containers without the complexity of managing servers.

AWS Fargate

Documents

AWS Fargate Tutorial (CloudShell)