Awesome to see Firecracker[1] already bearing fruit:<p>> <i>At re:Invent 2018 we announced Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services. Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. These microVMs can initiate code faster, with less overhead. Innovations such as these allow us to improve the efficiency of Fargate and help us pass on cost savings to customers.</i><p>Also seeing interesting Firecracker developments around OSv (7ms boot times)[2] and Kata Containers[3]<p>1. <a href="https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/</a><p>2. <a href="https://twitter.com/osvdev/status/1081461689139281920" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/osvdev/status/1081461689139281920</a><p>3. <a href="https://twitter.com/egernst/status/1076308458335494144" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/egernst/status/1076308458335494144</a>
I played around with fargate and one of the things I couldn’t work out is scaling quickly (or quick-enough). I think the problem wasn’t purely fargate but actually the load balancer. Even though containers were launched and responsive, the load balancer needed something like 3 liveness responses to bring it into the pool, and the time between each probe was something like 30 or 10 seconds and not very flexible (sorry, my memory is fuzzy)... so this felt like it only really fits loads that aren’t very spikey and also the potential saving from scaling down is somewhat reduced.<p>Did anyone experience something similar? Or maybe I did something wrong?<p>If one of the benefits of firecracker is quick spin up time, then this only works if the load balancer also responds quickly doesn’t it?<p>Granted, it was a while ago so things might have changed.
Glad to see this, Fargate was a pretty steep premium. Comparing an on-demand m5.large to the equivalent Fargate container looks to be a 20% premium, which seems reasonable.<p>Next I'd like to see an equivalent to EC2's reserved instance pricing.