AWS Fargate Pricing Explained

AWS Fargate offers a serverless computing solution that allows users to run containerized workloads without managing the underlying infrastructure, but this convenience comes with a cost premium compared to self-managed EC2 clusters. Fargate uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on vCPU and GB of RAM usage, with rates varying by operating system and CPU architecture, and includes ephemeral storage with additional costs for excess usage. Although Fargate simplifies operations by abstracting server management, it generally charges higher rates than equivalent EC2 instances, such as a 16% premium over c5.xlarge, 21% over m5.xlarge, and 40% over t3.xlarge instances. Fargate Spot offers potential savings of up to 70% but requires applications to be fault-tolerant due to possible interruptions. While Fargate can save operational time, managing one's own EC2 instances can lead to cost savings and performance improvements, especially when dealing with predictable compute patterns.