The platform integrates with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), which provides critical flexibility for our different development teams and their preferred orchestration tools.
The core functionality operates around a few key components that streamline our deployment processes:
• Task Definitions: The system relies on Task Definitions, which act as blueprints for our applications. Within these definitions, we specify the container image, networking settings, and precise resource allocations like CPU and memory. Fargate uses this blueprint to provision and run our containers without us needing to select or manage EC2 instances.
• Serverless Operation: The defining feature is its serverless nature. Fargate automatically provisions the necessary on-demand compute resources for our containers to run, effectively eliminating tasks like server patching, cluster capacity planning, and scaling of the underlying virtual machines.
• Granular Resource Allocation: We have fine-grained control over the resources allocated to each task. Fargate allows for specific CPU and memory configurations, which enables us to tune performance and optimize costs for different workloads, from simple web APIs to more intensive data processing jobs that can scale up to 16 vCPU and 120 GB of memory.
• Automated Scaling: The platform integrates natively with ECS and EKS auto-scaling policies. This allows our applications to scale the number of running tasks up or down automatically based on defined metrics such as CPU utilization or network traffic. This ensures our services remain responsive during traffic spikes while minimizing costs during quiet periods.
• Security and Isolation: Security is improved through its design, as each Fargate task or pod runs in its own isolated compute environment with a dedicated kernel. This prevents workloads from sharing underlying resources. We further secure our applications by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles for granular permissions, security groups, and network ACLs within our Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Integrated Tooling: Fargate works seamlessly with other AWS services. It integrates with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic across healthy containers, enhancing application availability. For observability, it provides built-in integration with Amazon CloudWatch, which gives us real-time access to logs and performance metrics like CPU and memory usage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While the abstraction of infrastructure is Fargate’s main advantage, it also introduces certain limitations. The primary aspect we find challenging is the lack of direct control over the underlying compute environment. For most of our applications, this is not an issue. However, for workloads that require specific OS-level configurations, custom kernel parameters, or access to specialized hardware not available through Fargate’s launch configurations, we cannot use it. In these specific scenarios, we must revert to the EC2 launch type, which requires us to manage the instances ourselves Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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