With serverless architecture gaining ground every year, Amazon came up with a service that makes running containers on the cloud much easier. Amazon Fargate lets users run containers without needing to set up, configure, and scale servers or clusters of virtual machines.
This means a lot of time saved, as users need not handle their servers or clusters. They leave the mundane activities of selecting server types, determining when to scale clusters, or even manage cluster packing to AWS. Instead of managing the infrastructure, they focus on creating applications.
You may use Fargate in two modes:
- Fargate Launch Type – with this mode, users simply package their application in containers, select the CPU and memory requirements, establish policies for networking and IAM, and launch their application.
2. EC2 Launch Type – provides detailed control of the infrastructure at the server-level. For example, users may use Amazon ECS to control clusters of servers and schedule container placement on the servers. They can leave the monitoring of resource to Amazon, which will also determine the best server to hold a container depending on one’s requirements. You may customize more things in this mode, such as provisioning, updating, and scaling your clusters. You may also determine which kind of servers to use, how many containers to run in a cluster for best performance, and when to add or subtract servers as needed.
Why Use Amazon Fargate?
- Less focus on managing your own infrastructure – with Amazon managing clusters of Amazon EC2 instances, you need not set instance types, handle scheduling of clusters, or optimizing your settings. Your primary focus is on creating containers to run your applications to create business value.
- Automated Scaling – Fargate makes scaling simple. Once application requirements are set, the service will manage the required scaling for one’s infrastructure. Fargate allows you to launch as many containers as you want within moments, and scale them to run the most important applications.
- Amazon ECS Integration – Fargate also integrates with Amazon ECS. Once the application is defined in Fargate, as you would in with ECS, you package it into task definitions, determine the required CPU and memory resources, set your policies for IAM and networking required for each container, and upload to Amazon ECS. Once this is complete, AWS Fargate will manage your containers.