AWS Fargate
- What it is
- Serverless compute engine for containers. It is not a standalone service — it is a launch type for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
- No EC2 instances to provision, patch, scale, or right-size.
- Billing
- Pay per second for the vCPU and memory the task requests, only while it runs.
- Not to be confused with
- AWS Lambda — event-driven functions, 15-minute max, packaged as code or a container image, cold starts. Fargate runs long-lived container tasks with no time limit.
- EC2 launch type — you manage the instance fleet, and pay for idle capacity.
- Exam signal
- “Run containers without managing servers” → Fargate.