AWS Fargate – Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure
Fargate looks really expensive compared to just running an EC2 instance. A 1 vCPU container with 2GB of RAM will run you $55/month. An m3.medium with 1 vCPU and 3.75GB of RAM is $49. The prices seen to get uncomfortably worse from there, though I haven't priced them out the whole way, but a 4 vCPU container with 8GB of RAM is price-competitive ($222 for the container, $227 monthly for the machine) with a freaking i3.xlarge, with 4 vCPUs and 30.5GB, and the i3.xlarge also has 10Gbit networking. Topping Fargate out at 4 vCPUs and 30GB of RAM puts it right between an r4.2xlarge and an i3.2xlarge, both with 8 vCPUs and 61GB of RAM (the i3 is more expensive because it's also got 1.9TB of local SSD).<p>Enough people are still trying to make fetch happen, where fetch is container orchestration, that I expect that fetch will indeed eventually happen, but this is a large vig for getting around not-a-lot-of-management-work (because the competition isn't Kubernetes, which is the bin packing problem returned to eat your wallet, it's EC2 instances, and there is a little management work but not much and it scales).<p>If you have decided that you want to undertake the bin packing problem, AWS's ECS or the new Elastic Kubernetes Service makes some sense; you're paying EC2 prices, plus a small management fee (I think). I don't understand Fargate at all.