AWS Fargate is a compute engine that uses containers as its fundamental compute primitive. AWS Fargate runs your application containers for you on demand. You no longer need to provision a pool of instances or manage a Docker daemon or orchestration agent. Because the infrastructure that runs your containers is invisible, you don’t have to worry about whether you have provisioned enough instances to run your containerized workload. You also don’t have to worry about whether you’re using those instances efficiently to avoid paying for resources that you don’t use. You no longer need to do undifferentiated heavy lifting to maintain the infrastructure that runs your containers. AWS Fargate automatically updates and patches underlying resources to keep you safe from vulnerabilities in the underlying operating system and software. AWS Fargate uses an on-demand pricing model that charges per vCPU and per GB of memory reserved per second, with a 1-minute minimum.

At re:Invent 2018 we announced Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services. Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. These microVMs can initiate code faster, with less overhead. Innovations such as these allow us to improve the efficiency of Fargate and help us pass on cost savings to customers.

Effective January 7th, 2019 Fargate pricing per vCPU per second is being reduced by 20%, and pricing per GB of memory per second is being reduced by 65%. Depending on the ratio of CPU to memory that you’re allocating for your containers, you could see an overall price reduction of anywhere from 35% to 50%.

The following table shows the price reduction for each built-in launch configuration.

vCPU GB Memory Effective Price Cut 0.25 0.5 -35.00% 0.25 1 -42.50% 0.25 2 -50.00% 0.5 1 -35.00% 0.5 2 -42.50% 0.5 3 -47.00% 0.5 4 -50.00% 1 2 -35.00% 1 3 -39.30% 1 4 -42.50% 1 5 -45.00% 1 6 -47.00% 1 7 -48.60% 1 8 -50.00% 2 4 -35.00% 2 5 -37.30% 2 6 -39.30% 2 7 -41.00% 2 8 -42.50% 2 9 -43.80% 2 10 -45.00% 2 11 -46.10% 2 12 -47.00% 2 13 -47.90% 2 14 -48.60% 2 15 -49.30% 2 16 -50.00% 4 8 -35.00% 4 9 -36.20% 4 10 -37.30% 4 11 -38.30% 4 12 -39.30% 4 13 -40.20% 4 14 -41.00% 4 15 -41.80% 4 16 -42.50% 4 17 -43.20% 4 18 -43.80% 4 19 -44.40% 4 20 -45.00% 4 21 -45.50% 4 22 -46.10% 4 23 -46.50% 4 24 -47.00% 4 25 -47.40% 4 26 -47.90% 4 27 -48.30% 4 28 -48.60% 4 29 -49.00% 4 30 -49.30%

Many engineering organizations such as Turner Broadcasting System, Veritone, and Catalytic have already been using AWS Fargate to achieve significant infrastructure cost savings for batch jobs, cron jobs, and other on-and-off workloads. Running a cluster of instances at all times to run your containers constantly incurs cost, but AWS Fargate stops charging when your containers stop.

With these new price reductions, AWS Fargate also enables significant savings for containerized web servers, API services, and background queue consumers run by organizations like KPMG, CBS, and Product Hunt. If your application is currently running on large EC2 instances that peak at 10-20% CPU utilization, consider migrating to containers in AWS Fargate. Containers give you more granularity to provision the exact amount of CPU and memory that your application needs. You no longer pay for instance resources that your application doesn’t use. If a sudden spike of traffic causes your application to require more resources you still have the ability to rapidly scale your application out by adding more containers, or scale your application up by launching larger containers.

AWS Fargate lets you focus on building your containerized application without worrying about the infrastructure. This encompasses not just the infrastructure capacity provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance but also the infrastructure price. Implementing Firecracker in AWS Fargate is just part of our journey to keep making AWS Fargate faster, more powerful, and more efficient. Running your containers in AWS Fargate allows you to benefit from these improvements without any manual intervention required on your part.

AWS Fargate has achieved SOC, PCI, HIPAA BAA, ISO, MTCS, C5, and ENS High compliance certification, and has a 99.99% SLA. You can get started with AWS Fargate in 13 AWS Regions around the world.