Amazon Fargate FAQs

Q: Why should I use Amazon Fargate?

Amazon Fargate enables you to focus on your applications. You define your application content, networking, storage, and scaling requirements. There is no provisioning, patching, cluster capacity management, or any infrastructure management required.

Q: What use cases does Amazon Fargate support?

Amazon Fargate supports all of the common container use cases, for example microservices architecture applications, batch processing, machine learning applications, and migrating on premise applications to the cloud.

Q: What is the pricing of Amazon Fargate?

With Amazon Fargate, you pay only for the amount of vCPU, memory, and storage resources consumed by your containerized applications.

vCPU and memory resources are calculated from the time your container images are pulled until the Amazon ECS task or EKS pod terminates, rounded up to the nearest second. A minimum charge of 1 minute applies. 20 GB of ephemeral storage is available for all Fargate Tasks and Pods by default—you only pay for any additional storage that you configure.

Q: How does Amazon Fargate work with Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Both ECS and EKS use containers provisioned by Fargate to automatically scale, load balance, and optimize container availability through managed scheduling, providing an easier way to build and operate containerized applications.

Q: How should I choose when to use Amazon Fargate?  

Choose Amazon Fargate to launch their containers without having to provision or manage EC2 instances. If you require greater control of your EC2 instances to support compliance and governance requirements or broader customization options, then use ECS without Fargate.

Q: Can I run my Amazon ECS Windows containers on Amazon Fargate?

Yes. Amazon Fargate offers a serverless approach for running your Windows containers. It removes the need to provision and manage servers and lets you specify and pay for resources per application. Fargate provides task-level isolation and handles the necessary patching and updating to help provide a secure compute environment.

Q: Can I use my existing Microsoft Windows License with Amazon Fargate?

Since Fargate is a serverless compute engine, customers do not need to manage the underlying compute instances running in Fargate. Therefore, Fargate will manage the Windows OS licenses for you and the cost of doing so is built into the Fargate pricing.

Q: Which Windows Server versions are supported with Amazon Fargate?

Fargate supports Windows Server 2019 Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release on Fargate Windows Platform Version 1.0.0 or later.