AWS Fargate is a good way to run and scale container workloads without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This serverless compute engine eliminates the burden of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers so your team can focus on building applications.

Fargate is compatible with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). So how can you use Fargate with these services? And which combination is “better”? This blog explores these questions.

Amazon ECS on Fargate

Amazon ECS, a fully managed container orchestration service, provides a way to deploy, run, manage, and scale secure and reliable containers on-premises and in the cloud. With Amazon ECS, you can easily leverage the many built-in integrations to run container workloads.

One such integration is with AWS Fargate, which eliminates the need to configure and manage container control planes, nodes, and instances. Thus, you will save time as you launch and run container-based applications in Amazon ECS.

Fargate tasks do not share the underlying kernel, CPU resources, memory resources, or elastic network interface with other tasks. If you have multiple tasks, you can use Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic evenly across them.

Amazon EKS on Fargate

Amazon EKS is a managed container service to create and scale Kubernetes clusters in the cloud or on-premises. The service offers efficient compute resource provisioning and automatic application scaling to reduce costs and automated security patching to secure the Kubernetes environment.

As with Amazon ECS, you can use AWS Fargate to run and scale Kubernetes workloads without provisioning or managing servers. Pods running on Fargate run in their own dedicated runtime environment and don’t share the underlying kernel, CPU resources, memory resources, or elastic network interface with other pods.

Amazon ECS using Fargate vs. Amazon EKS using Fargate

Both Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS are orchestration services to manage how your containers run. However, you will still have to manage your compute – which can involve considerable time and effort. With Fargate, you don’t have to manage the underlying compute.

All you have to manage is how Kubernetes (EKS) how Docker containers are configured (ECS). So, it’s not a question of whether ECS on Fargate is “better” than ECS on Fargate or vice versa. Rather, your infrastructure will inform your choice and determine the benefits you get from serverless compute.

Conclusion

AWS Fargate is a great choice for running many kinds of applications with both Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS. It will automatically determine the compute resources required so you don’t have to worry about selecting instance types or scaling the cluster capacity. To learn more about the benefits of AWS Fargate, talk to an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner like Axcess.io.