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What's the Difference Between Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate?

Compare Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon ECS
AWS Fargate
Category

Containers, Orchestration

Containers, Serverless Containers

Description

Fully managed AWS native container orchestration service

Serverless compute for containers. Run containers without managing servers or clusters.

Best for
  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration
Key features
  • AWS Fargate integration
  • Service auto scaling
  • Service mesh
  • Capacity providers
  • Spot instances
  • No server management
  • Isolation by design
  • ECS & EKS compatible
  • Spot capacity
  • ARM support
Pricing model

No additional charge for EC2 launch type; Fargate pricing for Fargate launch type

Pay for vCPU and memory per second

Free tier

No

No

Expert take

“ECS is the fastest path to running containers on AWS. Deep integration with IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC means less glue code, and flexible compute options (EC2, Fargate, or ECS Managed Instances) let you match infrastructure to your workload without managing orchestration overhead.”
— Aditya Ramakrishnan, AWS Product Marketing Manager

“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.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon ECS or AWS Fargate

Use Amazon ECS when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments

Learn more about Amazon ECS »

Use AWS Fargate when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration

Learn more about AWS Fargate »

AWS product comparisons

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