AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS (and EKS).
With the Fargate launch type, you run Docker containers without managing EC2 instances.
You define task definitions specifying CPU, memory, networking, and IAM roles, and AWS handles the provisioning and lifecycle of the underlying infrastructure.
How It Works
You choose Fargate as the launch type when running ECS tasks or services.
ECS places the containers on AWS-managed infrastructure—no need to launch or scale EC2 instances.
You only pay for the vCPU and memory your running tasks consume.
Key Benefits
No servers to manage – AWS handles provisioning, patching, and scaling of the compute resources.
Simplified scaling – increase or decrease the number of running tasks; Fargate allocates resources automatically.
Secure by design – each task runs in its own isolated environment.
Ideal for microservices and event-driven workloads that need flexible scaling without infrastructure overhead.
Architecture Overview
ECS tasks run inside AWS-managed infrastructure in your ECS cluster.
Fargate integrates with VPC networking, allowing fine-grained control over task placement and connectivity.
No direct access to the underlying hosts—only the container runtime and network interfaces are exposed for configuration.