Containers
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate supplies isolated, serverless compute for Amazon ECS tasks and Amazon EKS pods without exposing or requiring management of the underlying hosts.
Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with AWS Fargate.
AWS Fargate pricing and cost programs
Pricing model: Serverless container compute
- On-Demand
- Available
- Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
- Not applicable
- Savings Plans
- Available
- Spot
- Service-specific
Billing dimensions: vCPU time · Memory time · Operating system and architecture · Ephemeral storage
Programs and modes: Fargate · Fargate Spot · Compute Savings Plans
Fargate Spot is available through supported orchestration modes and is interruption-tolerant capacity.
Free Tier: Service-specific — verify current offers
Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.
Why implement AWS Fargate?
- Removes EC2 worker provisioning, operating-system patching, cluster capacity bin-packing, and host replacement from container operations.
- Allocates isolated CPU, memory, networking, and ephemeral storage per task or pod and scales with the orchestrator's requested workload.
- Works with ECS and EKS so teams can keep container packaging while choosing the orchestration API that fits their platform.
How to implement AWS Fargate
- Create an ECS task definition or EKS pod profile with a supported CPU, memory, architecture, operating system, and ephemeral-storage configuration.
- Assign workload and image-pull permissions, choose VPC subnets and security groups, and configure logs, secrets, health checks, and storage.
- Run tasks or create a service or deployment, then add load balancing, multi-Availability-Zone placement, autoscaling, and deployment alarms as needed.
AWS Fargate best practices
- Run containers as non-root where possible, use read-only filesystems and least-privilege task or pod identities, and never depend on privileged or host-level access.
- Right-size CPU and memory from observed use, keep images small, handle SIGTERM, and use health checks plus multiple Availability Zones for services.
- Restrict task networking with security groups, deliver logs and metrics centrally, and understand Fargate platform-version and task-retirement behavior.
AWS Fargate use cases and server impact
- Serverless containerized APIs
- Bursting workers and scheduled tasks
- ECS or EKS workloads without node fleets
Eliminates customer-managed container hosts while leaving container images, workload configuration, application security, and orchestration objects under customer control.
Official implementation resources
Commonly paired AWS services
- Amazon Elastic Container Service — Container orchestration
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service — Managed Kubernetes
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry — Container registry
- Elastic Load Balancing — Load balancing
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud — Isolated virtual network
- AWS Identity and Access Management — Identity & access
- Amazon CloudWatch — Metrics & logs
- AWS Secrets Manager — Store secrets & keys
Architecture patterns using this service
- Run a containerized web application on Amazon ECS and Fargate — Store immutable images in Amazon ECR, deploy tasks with Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, route HTTP traffic through an Application Load Balancer, and observe the service in CloudWatch.
- Process images and media after an Amazon S3 upload — Take a presigned Amazon S3 upload through EventBridge and SQS to Lambda, Fargate, or AWS Batch workers, write derived assets to a separate bucket, and serve them through CloudFront.