What is Amazon ECS & Fargate?
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. ECS integrates with AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers that removes the need to provision and manage servers.
With ECS and Fargate, you can focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. Fargate automatically provisions and scales the compute resources, while ECS handles the orchestration, service discovery, and integration with other AWS services like Application Load Balancer, CloudWatch, and IAM.
ECS Fargate Cost Calculator
Container Orchestration
Amazon ECS provides fully managed container orchestration that simplifies running, stopping, and managing Docker containers on a cluster. Fargate eliminates infrastructure management entirely.
Serverless Containers
Fargate runs containers without managing EC2 instances
Task & Service Management
Services maintain desired task count with health checks
Auto Scaling
Automatic scaling based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics
{
"family": "web-application",
"networkMode": "awsvpc",
"requiresCompatibilities": ["FARGATE"],
"cpu": "256",
"memory": "512",
"executionRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/ecsTaskExecutionRole",
"containerDefinitions": [
{
"name": "web-server",
"image": "nginx:latest",
"portMappings": [
{
"containerPort": 80,
"protocol": "tcp"
}
],
"essential": true,
"logConfiguration": {
"logDriver": "awslogs",
"options": {
"awslogs-group": "/ecs/web-application",
"awslogs-region": "us-west-2",
"awslogs-stream-prefix": "ecs"
}
}
}
]
}Service Features
Container Management
- • Task definitions & services
- • Health checks & monitoring
- • Service discovery
- • Load balancer integration
Networking & Security
- • VPC networking (awsvpc mode)
- • Security groups
- • IAM roles & policies
- • Secrets management
Deployment Strategies
- • Rolling updates
- • Blue-green deployments
- • Circuit breaker patterns
- • Canary releases
Monitoring & Logging
- • CloudWatch integration
- • Container Insights
- • X-Ray distributed tracing
- • Custom metrics
Cost Optimization
- • Fargate Spot (70% savings)
- • Right-sizing resources
- • Scheduled scaling
- • Reserved capacity
Integration
- • AWS services ecosystem
- • CI/CD pipelines
- • Service mesh (App Mesh)
- • Developer tools
Real-World Examples
Coca-Cola
Consumer Goods
Runs 1,000+ microservices across 200+ countries using ECS Fargate, enabling rapid deployment cycles and reducing infrastructure management overhead by 40%.
Samsung
Technology
Migrated 300+ applications to ECS with Fargate Spot, achieving 60% cost reduction for batch processing workloads while maintaining 99.9% availability SLAs.
Vanguard
Financial Services
Modernized trading systems using ECS with blue-green deployments, processing $4+ trillion in assets with zero-downtime deployments and regulatory compliance.
GE Healthcare
Healthcare Technology
Processes medical imaging data using ECS Fargate with GPU support, analyzing 50M+ medical images annually with AI/ML workloads and HIPAA compliance.
Fargate vs EC2 Launch Types
Fargate Serverless
No infrastructure management, pay-per-use, automatic scaling
EC2 Launch Type
Full control over instances, cost optimization, custom configurations
Hybrid Approach
Mix both launch types based on workload requirements
# Fargate Service with Spot
resource "aws_ecs_service" "app" {
name = "my-app"
cluster = aws_ecs_cluster.main.id
task_definition = aws_ecs_task_definition.app.arn
desired_count = 3
capacity_provider_strategy {
capacity_provider = "FARGATE_SPOT"
weight = 80
base = 1
}
capacity_provider_strategy {
capacity_provider = "FARGATE"
weight = 20
}
network_configuration {
subnets = var.private_subnet_ids
security_groups = [aws_security_group.app.id]
}
deployment_configuration {
deployment_circuit_breaker {
enable = true
rollback = true
}
}
}Best Practices
✅ Do
- •Use task and execution roles for granular IAM permissions and security
- •Implement health checks and circuit breaker patterns for reliable deployments
- •Use Fargate Spot for fault-tolerant workloads to reduce costs by up to 70%
- •Enable Container Insights for detailed monitoring and performance optimization
- •Use service discovery and load balancers for microservices communication
❌ Don't
- •Store secrets in environment variables - use Secrets Manager or Parameter Store
- •Over-provision resources - right-size CPU and memory for optimal cost efficiency
- •Ignore deployment configurations - use appropriate maximum and minimum percentages
- •Use public subnets for tasks - deploy in private subnets with NAT gateways
- •Skip logging configuration - always configure proper CloudWatch log groups