What's the Difference Between Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate?
Compare Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon EC2
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AWS Fargate
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Category
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Compute, Virtual Machines |
Containers, Serverless Containers |
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Description
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Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload |
Serverless compute for containers. Run containers without managing servers or clusters. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans |
Pay for vCPU and memory per second |
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Free tier
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Yes |
No |
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Expert take
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“EC2 gives you full control over the compute environment with 750+ instance types. For workloads that need sustained CPU, GPU acceleration, or specific OS configurations, EC2 remains the most flexible option on AWS.” |
“Fargate removes the need to manage EC2 instances for your containers. Choose it when you want per-task isolation without worrying about patching hosts, right-sizing nodes, or bin-packing. You pay per-second for only the vCPU and memory each task uses.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate
Use Amazon EC2 when:
- Web hosting
- Batch processing
- HPC
- Machine learning training
- Gaming servers
Use AWS Fargate when:
- Microservices
- Batch processing
- ML inference
- Application migration
Next steps with AWS for Compute
AWS product comparisons
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