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

Compare Amazon EKS 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 EKS
AWS Fargate
Category

Containers, Kubernetes

Containers, Serverless Containers

Description

Managed Kubernetes service for running containerized applications

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

Best for
  • Kubernetes workloads
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Machine learning
  • Batch processing
  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration
Key features
  • Managed control plane
  • EKS Anywhere
  • Fargate support
  • Add-ons marketplace
  • Auto mode
  • No server management
  • Isolation by design
  • ECS & EKS compatible
  • Spot capacity
  • ARM support
Pricing model

$0.10/hr per cluster + underlying compute

Pay for vCPU and memory per second

Free tier

No

No

Expert take

"EKS is production-grade Kubernetes without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of operating it. From Auto Mode handling compute lifecycle to EKS Capabilities providing managed Argo CD and resource orchestration, teams get the full Kubernetes ecosystem with the reliability and scale of AWS underneath”
— 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 EKS or AWS Fargate

Use Amazon EKS when:

  • Kubernetes workloads
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Machine learning
  • Batch processing

Learn more about Amazon EKS »

Use AWS Fargate when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration

Learn more about AWS Fargate »

AWS product comparisons

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