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).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).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.