Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is indispensable. The scalability and high performance of ECS reduce costs and improve compatibility in container orchestration.
Having said that, there is a great deal of manual infrastructure configuration, management, and oversight that goes into it. That's why AWS launched Fargate.
AWS Fargate is a serverless container management service (container as a service) that allows developers to focus on their application and not their infrastructure. Fargate allows you to spend less time managing Amazon EC2 instances and more time building and helping with container orchestration.
With AWS ECS Fargate, there is no server provisioning and managing. You can seamlessly meet your application's computing needs with auto-scaling, and benefit from enhanced security and better resource utilization.
Before AWS Fargate, ECS required more of a hands-on approach, manual server configurations, management, and monitoring, which greatly impacted efficiency. One ended up with many clusters of VMs that reduced speed and complicated things.
Now with AWS Fargate, you can run containers without crashing under infrastructure management requirements.
Let's explore this potential:
Reduced operational overhead
When you run Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, your focus shifts from managing infrastructure to managing apps. Once you pay for the containers, server management, scaling, and patching are taken care of. AWS Fargate will keep everything up to date.
In this compute engine, you can build and manage apps with both ECS and EKS. You can work from anywhere with assured efficient resource utilization, thanks to auto-scaling.
AWS Fargate makes work easy for IT staff and developers. Unlike before, there is no tinkering with complicated access rules or server selection. You get to invest more time and expertise in development and deployment.
More cost savings
AWS Fargate automatically right-sizes resources based on the compute requirements of your apps. That makes it a cloud cost optimization approach worth exploring. There is no overprovisioning, for example, because you only pay for the resources that you use.
Further, you can take advantage of Fargate Spot to save up to 70% on fault-tolerant applications. It works well for big data apps, batch processing, and CI/CD apps. On the other hand, the Compute Savings Plan gives you a chance to slash costs by up to 50% for your persistent workloads.
Additionally;
- With Fargate, you only incur charges when your container workloads are running inside the VM
- Cost isn't based on the total run time of the VM instance
- Scheduling on Fargate is much better compared to standard ECS; that makes it easier to budgetize containers based on time for more savings
Security enhanced and simplified
AWS calls it "Secure isolation by design." Your ECS tasks run in their isolated underlying kernel. The isolation boundary dedicates CPU resources, memory, and storage to individual workloads, significantly enhancing each task's security.
With ECS, this isolation led to complexities. Having several layers of containers and tasks meant that you would need security for each one. Fargate simplifies things, in terms of infrastructure security. Using AWS ECS Fargate, you worry less about:
- Compromised ports
- API exposure
- Data leaks from remote code execution
Monitoring and insights
You get improved monitoring of applications with AWS ECS Fargate. The compute engine has built-in integrations with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and other services. You will stay up to date on metrics and logs concerning your applications to detect threats and enhance your cloud infrastructure compliance.
You get ready compatibility with third-party tools for;
- Collecting and correlating security telemetry from containers and orchestration
- Monitoring AWS ECS Fargate processes and apps
- Tracking network activity in AWS Fargate
- Viewing AWS CloudTrail Logs across AWS Fargate
There has to be a bit of a But:
Customization
Fargate reduces customization to improve ease of use. You may find, therefore, that your control is much limited when deploying ECS on Fargate. An alternative container-as-service management platform may offer greater fine-tuning.
Regional availability
AWS Fargate is not available everywhere. By mid-2020, the compute engine for EKS and ECS is not available in more than a dozen regions for their data centers. Businesses in these regions have no other option but to use alternative container management services.
To Summarize:
Fargate allows for building and deployment in a scalable, secure, and cost-effective manner. This is a fast-growing solution that reduces the infrastructure management needs for developers and IT staff. At Cloudride, we can guide you on Fargate and other container-as-service solutions to help you adequately deal with the challenges of cloud cost and security. We specialize in AWS, Azure, GCP, and other ISVs.
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