Fargate allows you to manage and deploy containers without having to worry about running the underlying compute infrastructure
Fargate serves as a new backend (in addition to the legacy EC2 backend) on which ECS and EKS tasks can be run
Fargate and EC2 backends are called "Launch Types"
Fargate allows you to treat containers as fundamental building blocks of your infrastructure
Fargate Tips
Fargate follows a similar mindset to Lambda, which lets you focus on applications, instead of dealing with underlying infrastructure
Fargate is supported by CloudFormation, aws-cli and ecs-cli
Fargate tasks can be launched alongside tasks that use EC2 Launch Type
💸Before creating a large Fargate deployment, make sure to estimate costs and compare them against alternative solution that uses traditional EC2 deployment - Fargate prices can be several times those of equivalently-sized EC2 instances. To evaluate both solutions based on potential costs, refer to pricing for EC2 and Fargate.
Fargate Alternatives and Lock-in
🚪Azure Container Instances: Available on Microsoft Azure in preview version, allows to run applications in containers without having to manage virtual machines
Fargate Gotchas and Limitations
As of April 2018, Fargate is available in multiple regions: us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2, and eu-west-1
As of January 2019, Fargate can only be used with ECS. Support for EKS was originally planned for 2018, but has yet to launch.
The smallest resource values that can be configured for an ECS Task that uses Fargate is 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GB of memory