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.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon ECS
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AWS Fargate
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Category
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Containers, Orchestration |
Containers, Serverless Containers |
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Description
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Fully managed AWS native container orchestration service |
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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No additional charge for EC2 launch type; Fargate pricing for Fargate launch type |
Pay for vCPU and memory per second |
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Free tier
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No |
No |
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Expert take
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“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.” |
“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 ECS or AWS Fargate
Use Amazon ECS when:
- Microservices
- Batch jobs
- Application migration
- Hybrid deployments
Use AWS Fargate when:
- Microservices
- Batch processing
- ML inference
- Application migration
Next steps with AWS for Containers
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