Fargate vs ECS: What's the difference between AWS Fargate and Amazon's Elastic Container Service
Difference between ECS and Fargate
The key difference between Amazon’s Fargate and AWS ECS is that ECS is a container orchestration service while Fargate is a serverless compute engine that runs containers without requiring you to manage servers.
What does ECS do?
Amazon Elastic Container Service or ECS is a platform that schedules and manages containers.
It decides how containers are placed, connected to networks, scaled, and monitored. ECS lets you choose the infrastructure that runs your containers.
You can use EC2 instances that you manage or you can choose Fargate so that you do not manage servers. ECS acts as the orchestrator that gives structure to how your container workloads operate in AWS.
What does Fargate do?
AWS Fargate is the serverless compute engine that runs your containers for you.
You define the amount of CPU and memory and the container image. AWS handles provisioning, patching, scaling, and server management in the background. You do not think about EC2 instances or Kubernetes worker nodes.
You focus on your application and Fargate handles the rest.
How to choose between ECS and Fargate?
Use ECS to orchestrate container workloads. Pick the EC2 launch type when you need deep control of the underlying infrastructure.
Pick the Fargate launch type when you want AWS to manage the infrastructure so you can focus on the application.
Think of ECS as the control plane and think of Fargate as a compute option that ECS can use.
Comparison table
| Aspect | ECS | Fargate |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Container orchestration service | Serverless compute engine for containers |
| Main responsibility | Manages placement, scheduling, networking, scaling, and monitoring of containers | Runs containers without server management |
| Infrastructure management | Runs on EC2 instances that you manage | No infrastructure management required |
| Integration options | Works with EC2 and with Fargate | Available as a compute option in ECS and in EKS |
| Level of control | High infrastructure control when using EC2 | Minimal infrastructure control with focus on the application |
Cameron McKenzie is an AWS Certified AI Practitioner, Machine Learning Engineer, Solutions Architect and author of many popular books in the software development and Cloud Computing space. His growing YouTube channel training devs in Java, Spring, AI and ML has well over 30,000 subscribers.