AWS Fargate lets you run containers without managing infrastructure

At the AWS re:Invent conference today in Las Vegas, the company introduced AWS Fargate, a new service that lets you run containers without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

This is a fairly remarkable idea. You can launch your containers, let Kubernetes or other orchestration engine act as the manager and AWS will handle all of the underlying hardware requirements for you.

As Randall Hunt put it in a company blog post announcing the new service, “To put it simply, Fargate is like EC2 but instead of giving you a virtual machine you get a container. It’s a technology that allows you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances” he wrote.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy, introducing the new service on stage at re:Invent, stressed that it was really simple to use. You outline a set of tasks, specify the memory and CPU you need along with identity and access management requirements and Fargate does the rest. You don’t have to worry about provisioning servers or clusters and it autoscales for you.

It simplifies the complex act of managing the underlying infrastructure. While some companies might want to maintain control over that — and there is still EC2 for them — those that want to remove the infrastructure management layer can use Fargate and let AWS handle all of that for them.

What’s more, once you configure Fargate for your particular application’s requirements, you only pay for the resources required for each container.

There are plans to expand beyond this starting point announced today. Amazon also announced Amazon EKS, their version of Kubernetes today and the blog post indicated that the company will be supporting launching containers using Fargate in combination with EKS, an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense.

For today, Fargate is launching in the US East (Northern Virginia) region.