AWS Fargate Deep Dive

I love AWS, I really do and I thought about using fargate because the promise of not managing your “cattle-like” servers is wonderful but they need to get the pricing within this stratosphere for it to not be a complete joke.<p>I actually really like ECS and aware of how much time it would save me (a lot) and how much terraform I could delete (a ton) and it’s still not even close to worth it.<p>Amazon usually nails this sort of thing, surprising that despite the operational value it provides nobody seems to be using it.

We spend ~900$ a month on fargate to run our of our dev, stage, qa, and prod environments as well as some other services and sqs consumers. After the recent price decrease we looked at how much reserve instance would save us and the few hundred in savings would not make sense vs the over provisioning and need to dedicate resources to scaling and new tools to monitor individual containers.<p>Note: do have some stuff in lambda but its package size restrictions limit us.

For people who worry about security (either sincere or tick the box types): what are the pros and cons of managed containers? It seems like you get a reduction in attack surface but also have fewer tools at your disposal

I would love a managed Kubernetes Deployment&#x2F;Job&#x2F;StatefulSet. Forget managing the cluster or the node, just allow me to &quot;apply&quot; a Deployment config with associated Service straight to the cloud. I will tell you my resource limits bill me accordingly.<p>I hope Google Cloud or AWS is working on that. That would have a much wider impact then Fargate.

I’m using Fargate for services that are CPU intensive (i.e. 24&#x2F;7) and not reactive by nature. It’s been a good experience so far.

For my poor brain still trying to cope with the enslaught of the huge number of all these cloud service features ... this sounds a lot like kubernetes ... is this just a proprietary version of that? Can someone differentiate them for me?

I like using Fargate for one-shot tasks that are easy to split up. I used it a couple of times for summary tasks on large batches of satellite data (100s of GBs). Set up a docker image that takes the month for which to do the analysis as environment variable and then launch 50 or so Fargate tasks in parallel. Fairly easy to set up and can save quite a lot of time. If it&#x27;s for short running jobs the increased price is not much of an issue. For more complicated, long-running services I feel like I would prefer managed Kubernetes.

Can I easily SSH into or otherwise interactively get a shell into a Fargate container? I think this is a minimum debuggability requirment for these kinds of services.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aws&#x2F;containers-roadmap&#x2F;issues&#x2F;187" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aws&#x2F;containers-roadmap&#x2F;issues&#x2F;187</a> sounds like the answer is &quot;no&quot;?

This product always makes me think of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I wonder if that&#x27;s where the name originated.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uOd7HQoKxcU?t=50" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uOd7HQoKxcU?t=50</a>

Is EKS a serious competitor to this? It seems like it would be and the bonus of no lockin. What&#x27;s the advantage of Fargate over EKS?

I still haven&#x27;t managed to SSH into a container (for Django). The best way I guess is SSM (systems security manager) which at least gives a web based console.<p>codepipeline integration was time consuming to set up. You have to get it to create a json file with the image id and uh I&#x27;d have to consult my notes.<p>All told, it was more complicated to set up than I expected.

In general, you should just start with whatever service AWS has that integrates the most features, and once you know what your technical requirements&#x2F;limitations are, you&#x27;ll know if you need to back up to a less integrated solution. Worst case, you&#x27;re paying too much for a solution for a short time, but you have a working MVP.

Does anyone remember that time at Re:Invent 2017 when they announced Fargate, and said that Fargate was coming to EKS &quot;soon&quot;? Let&#x27;s put odds on which is released first: Fargate for EKS, or Half Life 3.

NodeChef is a good alternative where you don&#x27;t have to do the tedious job of managing servers. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nodechef.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nodechef.com&#x2F;</a>