ECS + Fargate versus ECS + Cluster Auto Scaling

11 Dec 2024

Learn how ECS + Fargate differs from ECS + Cluster Auto Scaling.

ECS + Fargate ECS + Cluster Auto Scaling
Deployment Options

⚠️ AWS only

⚠️ AWS only (except ECS Anywhere)

Availability

✅ All AWS regions

✅ All AWS regions

Cluster Costs (per month)

$ 0.00

$ 0.00

Compute Costs

💰💰

💰

Compute Pricing Options

✅ On-demand
✅ Spot
✅ Savings Plan

✅ On-demand
✅ Spot
✅ Savings Plan

Virtual Machines

✅ Does not involve managing EC2 instances.

⚠️ EC2 instances running in your AWS account. ECS Cluster Auto Scaling does not cover all aspects of operating virtual machines (e.g. rolling update to update AMI).

Infrastructure Scaling

✅ AWS takes care of the scaling of the infrastructure.

⚠️ ECS Cluster Auto Scaling works fine for scaling up. But will not scale down automatically in most scenarios.

Networking

✅ ENI and Security Group per task/container.

✅ ENI and Security Group per task/container.

Load Balancing

✅ ALB + NLB

✅ ALB + NLB + CLB

Service Discovery

✅ Cloud Map

✅ Cloud Map