Fargate Pricing: Is it Worth the Cost? A Comprehensive Comparison to EC2 and Alternative Options
Published: 2023-12-27 20:39:34

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that work with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate allows for running containers without the need to manage servers or clusters, which can be both a blessing and a curse depending on your perspective. As more organizations embrace containerization, understanding Fargate pricing is critical to managing cloud costs effectively. This article provides a Fargate pricing breakdown, including a comparison to EC2 and alternative container management options.

## Fargate Pricing Model
Unlike traditional EC2 instances where you pay for a server whether or not you fully utilize its resources, with Fargate, you only pay for the resources that your containerized applications actually consume. Fargate charges are based on the vCPU and RAM allocated to your containers, multiplied by the number of tasks running.

### Fargate Pricing Example
Let's examine the cost for a specific task. If we consider a task that requires 2 vCPUs and 1GB of RAM in the us-east-1 region, the hourly rate for Fargate would consist of the vCPU charge plus the memory charge. As of the knowledge cut-off date, the Fargate pricing for 2 vCPUs is approximately $0.04048 per hour and for 1GB of memory is $0.004445 per hour, making the total cost approximately $0.044925 per hour for one task.

For a service running 3 of these tasks continuously, the cost would be 3 times higher, resulting in an hourly cost of approximately $0.134775.

### Fargate vs EC2 Cost Comparison
For this comparison, let's consider self-managing an EC2 cluster of m5.large instances, which come with 2 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. The pricing for an m5.large instance in the us-east-1 region is around $0.096 per hour.

Fargate seems more expensive since you could run a single m5.large instance at a lower hourly rate compared to running three Fargate tasks with the same amount of vCPU and much less RAM. This does not even take into account the additional RAM resources available with the m5.large instance.

## Fargate Performance and Instance Types
One potential issue with Fargate is that it does not guarantee performance or the type of underlying instance your containers will run on. Your tasks could be placed on a variety of EC2 instances with different performance characteristics, which might not always suit your workload's needs.

## Fargate Alternatives
When considering alternatives, organizations could either manage their own containerized infrastructure using EC2 instances or explore other container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes on EC2. They could also look into services similar to Fargate provided by other cloud vendors, or a combination thereof.

## Is Fargate Worth the Cost?
Fargate's major advantage is the simplification of container management. It eliminates the need to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers, which can significantly reduce the operational burden. However, this comfort comes at a noticeable premium.

For businesses that demand flexibility, control, and potentially better performance, self-managed EC2 instances could be more cost-effective. However, any cost savings must be weighed against the additional effort required to manage the underlying infrastructure.

## Conclusion
In the debate of Fargate vs EC2 cost, AWS Fargate is typically more expensive, especially for long-running and stable workloads. Fargate pricing is simple and transparent, billed for the vCPU and memory resources your containers use. However, this simplicity comes at a higher price compared to managing your own EC2 instances, where there is an opportunity to optimize costs based on actual usage.

When determining if Fargate costs are justifiable, businesses must assess whether the reduced operational complexity and time savings offset the higher price point. Additionally, performance considerations based on the unpredictable nature of the underlying hardware could be a factor for performance-sensitive applications. 

Ultimately, the decision will hinge on your company's specific needs, expertise, and willingness to operate and manage infrastructure versus the desire for a managed service like Fargate. It's worth exploring Fargate pricing calculators and Fargate pricing models in detail and comparing them to the costs of self-managed EC2 instances and Fargate alternatives before making a final decision.