AWS Fargate: Exploring its Features and Benefits

AWS Fargate was introduced back in 2017, it is a cloud-computing platform that allows users to run Docker containers in the cloud. It has become immensely popular and widely used as it allows you to modify applications by running containers in the cloud. With Fargate, you can plan or manage your applications while AWS manages and maintains the infrastructure. AWS services come in handy with user-friendly functions, database storage, and numerous benefits to firms. In this blog, we will get an overview of AWS Fargate, its working, comparison, features, and benefits.

What is AWS Fargate?

AWS Fargate is a container management service offered by Amazon Web Services. It is a computational processor and a serverless engine, that works with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Services(ECS) as well. To manage and launch containers, AWS Fargate interfaces with Amazon EKS and ECS.

It offers to execute and manage applications without providing scale clusters of VMS and helps developers quickly deploy or manage their applications. To understand the subject in depth, you can enroll in an AWS course available online.

How Does Fargate AWS Operate

Having discussed what is Fargate in AWS, let us now move to its functioning. 

1. Key Terms

First, let’s familiarise ourselves with some important terms which we will come in handy while working on AWS Fargate:

• Container – A Container or Docker Container is a module used in software development. It stores all the necessities required for your application to work that include the source code, system tools, libraries, runtime, etc.

• Container Image – Containers are constructed using a template code which is set to a read-only format. These templates are known as Container Images. Images are basically plain text files specifying the elements of a container. A registry is used for storing these images through which they can be downloaded to run inside the container.

• Task Definitions – It is a file describing containers (one or more) that together constitute your application. Text definition is also a text file that comes in JSON format and with a blueprint layout for the applications.

• Task – It is an abstract of a task defined inside a cluster so, the number of tasks that can run on your cluster can be specified.

• Clusters – It is a logical collection of resources that your application requires. When we use the Fargate launch type for tasks inside clusters then they are managed by Amazon ECS.

2. Working of AWS Fargate

By understanding these words, we can continue to learn about the working of AWS Fargate:

• You need to set up a Container Image as per the requirements of your application and then push it into a registry. 

• After that, you can choose a container orchestration service provided by either Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS to allocate resources to our application.

•  Finally, you need to construct a cluster to group all the resources allocated together. It takes place after choosing the AWS Fargate launch type. 

• The AWS Fargate will start and run all your containers and it will also manage the clusters and fulfill the needs of our application automatically. 

Features of AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is built with numerous features which provide developers the ability to handle the applications and containers. Let’s have a look at some of them:

• Amazon-managed service – AWS Fargate has the feature of managing the clusters automatically by Fargate. We only need to take care of the software design and containers. We are not responsible for the management of EC2 instances.
• Scaling of resources – We don’t need to take care of the needs of resources by the application. The requirements of the application once provided are fulfilled by Fargate on its own. Thousands of clusters are scaled by Fargate within seconds. Fargate ensures the high availability of resources to assure the smooth running of containers. AWS Fargate eliminates the need for us to worry about manually scaling clusters or optimizing container usage. This allows us to focus on developing our containerized applications without doubting the underlying infrastructure.
• Integration with Amazon ECS – Fargate is integrated with ECS very easily. We need to define the application as we do for Amazon ECS. Our application will be packed into task definitions and all the stipulations can be specified.

AWS ECS Vs AWS Fargate

AWS ECS is a container service that allows you to easily execute your application and simplifies the management and deployment whereas AWS Fargate manages the clusters and offers to run applications without providing scale clusters of VMS.

Features	AWS ECS	AWS Fargate
Environment and Clusters	ECS supports duplicating environments through CLI/SDK calls. This provides management for many containers.	Fargate has support for heterogeneous clusters that are constituted of tasks that run on both Fargate and EC2 launch types. This is an ideal environment for horizontal scaling at a fast rate.
Management and packaging	ECS has no requirement for its own registry management.	Fargate oversees the bin packaging problems.
Supporter	ECS also supports Docker Compose through its CLI.	Fargate also has the same actions as ECS in its API for the users to use AWS CLI easily.
Cost-effective	ECS is available free of cost but the resources required for support of applications are paid.	Fargate is paid but paying for resources is more costly in the long term when compared to Fargate computing time payment.

Benefits of AWS Fargate

• Container-based application management is provided as a service without much requirement of input from our side to run the Docker apps

• Separate containers are available to run groups of applications through Microservices.

• Scaling of clusters is done automatically by providing them with enough resources to keep the containers running properly and also the time when the clusters are needed to be scaled is taken care of.

• Elastic Load Balancing, EBS Volumes, IAM, Batch, CloudFormation templates, and CloudWatch logs are all combined together.

• It offers a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that restricts sharing of resources with other users.

• CodePipeline can be executed with ECS.

Conclusion

AWS Fargate is the container-based serverless technology in the future of the cloud. It simplifies your management and deployment with the easy allowance for applications to run on a managed cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.