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AWS Fargate — 101
In this post, I will provide the AWS Fargate overview, its benefits, and its core functions from a session 101 perspective.
Overview
We already discussed how containers benefit in the software lifecycle here. You can package your application in the form of container and run it anywhere, consistently.
To run your containers, you need to manage the underline infrastructure. This includes your servers, network, OS upgrades, scaling, security and other configurations. if you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of containers this can become very complex.
Fargate provides a serverless platform to run containerized applications, where you do not need to manage the underline infrastructure and operations.
Benefits
Is there any benefit to using Fargate? Yes !
First, as we discussed, it helps in removing the operational overhead to provision, scale, patch, help secure, and manage your servers.
It provides improved security. Each of the fargate instances has its own isolation boundary, and does not share the underlying kernel, CPU, memory, or the elastic network interface.
It can provide cost benefits from multiple perspectives. You only pay for the compute, your applications are consuming. Fargate Spot, Compute Savings Plans, and AWS Graviton processors further help in reducing the costs for you.
It also provides built-in monitoring with the help of AWS CloudWatch Container Insights which automatically collects metrics for resources, like CPU, memory, disk, network, etc., aggregates and summarizes them for you.
How does it work?
As already said, its a Serverless platform for containerized applications. So we need to do very minimal to use it. You just need to select the container image, specify memory and CPU, and you can start running your containerized applications.
It supports Linux and Windows operating systems including Amazon Linux, Windows Server 2019 and 2022, as of now. You can find more details on this here.
When you run Linux containers, you can use X86_64 CPU architecture, or the ARM64 architecture. With Windows containers, you must have the X86_64 CPU architecture.
AWS Fargate provides an easy to run platform to run your containers. Its compatible with both the container orchestrators on AWS — ECS, the elastic container service and the EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service.
References
- Containers 101 — https://medium.com/@lalverma/what-is-a-container-7395917d8489
- Fargate User Guide — https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/userguide/what-is-fargate.html
