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AWS Fargate vs AWS Lambda: What are the differences?
What is AWS Fargate? Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure. AWS Fargate is a technology for Amazon ECS and EKS* that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers.
What is AWS Lambda? Automatically run code in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or updates in DynamoDB. AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
AWS Fargate can be classified as a tool in the "Containers as a Service" category, while AWS Lambda is grouped under "Serverless / Task Processing".
Some of the features offered by AWS Fargate are:
- No clusters to manage
- seamless scaling
- integrated with Amazon ECS and EKS
On the other hand, AWS Lambda provides the following key features:
- Extend other AWS services with custom logic
- Build custom back-end services
- Completely Automated Administration
According to the StackShare community, AWS Lambda has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1345 company stacks & 2966 developers stacks; compared to AWS Fargate, which is listed in 53 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:
- Developer Experience trumps everything.
- AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
- If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:
- Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
- Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
- Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
- Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
- Heroku
- Lambda
It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?
I chopped that question up into the following categories:
- Developer Experience / DX 🤓
- Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
- Cost 💵
- Lock in 🔐
Read the full post linked below for all details
Pros of AWS Fargate
Pros of AWS Lambda
- No infrastructure128
- Cheap82
- Quick69
- Stateless58
- No deploy, no server, great sleep47
- AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it9
- Easy to deploy6
- Extensive API6
- Auto scale and cost effective6
- Event Driven Governance6
- VPC Support5
- Integrated with various AWS services3
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Cons of AWS Fargate
Cons of AWS Lambda
- Cant execute ruby or go5
- Compute time limited1
- Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort0
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What is AWS Fargate?
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