AWS Fargate may actually be good for your (company’s) wallet.

When AWS Fargate launched, there was a wide consensus that the pricing was too high, with the move seen as AWS choosing to target companies wanting to run container workloads without Kubernetes. However, with the advent of AWS EKS backed by Fargate Profiles, and ECS with Fargate Spot compatibility, you may wish to consider this product once more.

Since nobody else has made a basic pricing table for my region (ap-northeast-1, Tokyo), I’ll share this with you below. (No guarantee on the pricing being correct now, or in the future though!)

For workloads, it may be worth considering Fargate Spot for things such as CI builds, extra scaling above base load and asynchronous data transformation. Normal Fargate for critical workloads such as non-idempotent processing of data. With a guarantee of 99.99% uptime, this may be an excellent option for your next compute project.

But why should I use Fargate?

As of right now, the most common way to provide Compute on AWS is via EC2 instances. However, this comes with a tradeoff between you and AWS, which is that you are entirely responsible for:

• capacity for autoscaling
• optimisation of your instance types (choosing the right size)
• orchestration technology (including attempting to reduce overhead)
• security, networking, and maintenance

But with Fargate, you do not have to worry about most of these things.

• Fargate has virtually unlimited capacity (depending on account limits and whether you choose Fargate Spot).
• No underlying nodes to worry about, you choose a CPU/Memory combo and that’s what you get served.
• You can use Fargate with EKS for the benefit of Kubernetes, and never run node groups in EC2, meaning your base load can be 0, resulting in a further reduction of costs.
• Security, networking and maintenance are all handled by AWS. For instance, during the Spectre/Meltdown incidents, AWS patched Fargate, but anyone running shared workloads on EC2 was left to orchestrate and perform a patch to their fleets manually.
• As mentioned previously, AWS guarantees Fargate availability to 99.99%.
• The massive amount of engineer time saved by using a solution like Fargate cannot be measured. That’s up to how you or your organisation works.

Pricing Chart (for Tokyo)

ap-northeast-1	CPU/hr	Memory/hr	Total per 1hr build	Total Monthly	Spot CPU/hr	Spot Memory/hr	Spot Total per 1hr build	Spot Total Monthly
0.25CPU/0.5GB	0.01264	0.002765	0.015405	11.24565	0.0038293375	0.00083767	0.0046670075	3.406915475
0.25CPU/1GB	0.01264	0.00553	0.01817	13.2641	0.0038293375	0.00167534	0.0055046775	4.018414575
0.25CPU/2GB	0.01264	0.01106	0.0237	17.301	0.0038293375	0.00335068	0.0071800175	5.241412775
0.5CPU/1GB	0.02528	0.00553	0.03081	22.4913	0.007658675	0.00167534	0.009334015	6.81383095
0.5CPU/2GB	0.02528	0.01106	0.03634	26.5282	0.007658675	0.00335068	0.011009355	8.03682915
0.5CPU/3GB	0.02528	0.01659	0.04187	30.5651	0.007658675	0.00502602	0.012684695	9.25982735
0.5CPU/4GB	0.02528	0.02212	0.0474	34.602	0.007658675	0.00670136	0.014360035	10.48282555
1CPU/2GB	0.05056	0.01106	0.06162	44.9826	0.01531735	0.00335068	0.01866803	13.6276619
1CPU/3GB	0.05056	0.01659	0.06715	49.0195	0.01531735	0.00502602	0.02034337	14.8506601
1CPU/4GB	0.05056	0.02212	0.07268	53.0564	0.01531735	0.00670136	0.02201871	16.0736583
1CPU/5GB	0.05056	0.02765	0.07821	57.0933	0.01531735	0.0083767	0.02369405	17.2966565
1CPU/6GB	0.05056	0.03318	0.08374	61.1302	0.01531735	0.01005204	0.02536939	18.5196547
1CPU/7GB	0.05056	0.03871	0.08927	65.1671	0.01531735	0.01172738	0.02704473	19.7426529
1CPU/8GB	0.05056	0.04424	0.0948	69.204	0.01531735	0.01340272	0.02872007	20.9656511
2CPU/4GB	0.10112	0.02212	0.12324	89.9652	0.0306347	0.00670136	0.03733606	27.2553238
2CPU/5GB	0.10112	0.02765	0.12877	94.0021	0.0306347	0.0083767	0.0390114	28.478322
2CPU/6GB	0.10112	0.03318	0.1343	98.039	0.0306347	0.01005204	0.04068674	29.7013202
2CPU/7GB	0.10112	0.03871	0.13983	102.0759	0.0306347	0.01172738	0.04236208	30.9243184
2CPU/8GB	0.10112	0.04424	0.14536	106.1128	0.0306347	0.01340272	0.04403742	32.1473166
2CPU/9GB	0.10112	0.04977	0.15089	110.1497	0.0306347	0.01507806	0.04571276	33.3703148
2CPU/10GB	0.10112	0.0553	0.15642	114.1866	0.0306347	0.0167534	0.0473881	34.593313
2CPU/11GB	0.10112	0.06083	0.16195	118.2235	0.0306347	0.01842874	0.04906344	35.8163112
2CPU/12GB	0.10112	0.06636	0.16748	122.2604	0.0306347	0.02010408	0.05073878	37.0393094
2CPU/13GB	0.10112	0.07189	0.17301	126.2973	0.0306347	0.02177942	0.05241412	38.2623076
2CPU/14GB	0.10112	0.07742	0.17854	130.3342	0.0306347	0.02345476	0.05408946	39.4853058
2CPU/15GB	0.10112	0.08295	0.18407	134.3711	0.0306347	0.0251301	0.0557648	40.708304
2CPU/16GB	0.10112	0.08848	0.1896	138.408	0.0306347	0.02680544	0.05744014	41.9313022
4CPU/8GB	0.20224	0.04424	0.24648	179.9304	0.0612694	0.01340272	0.07467212	54.5106476