Happy 5th birthday, AWS Fargate!

In just 5 years, AWS Fargate has emerged as the mission-critical infrastructure for customers seeking to adopt container-based applications without managing underlying infrastructure. Its ability to provide serverless compute paired with a unique security model, where every container is wrapped in a virtual machine, has earned the trust of many organizations. AWS Fargate has been a success for the world’s largest financial services organizations requiring strong isolation to startups seeking to focus on building their business rather than managing infrastructure.

Today, AWS Fargate is trusted by companies such as Goldman Sachs and Vanguard to run a broad array of workloads from simple web sites and generic batch jobs, to more sophisticated workloads such as including training natural language processing models, processing high performance financial modeling, analyzing drone imagery of agriculture fields, powering insurance claims management at scale, and more. Amazon teams increasingly choose to build and even rearchitect their own services and products with AWS Fargate to take advantage of the benefits provided with serverless containers.

Milestones along the journey

Today’s AWS Fargate was not built in a day, but through a series of steady improvements and milestones along the way.

November 2017: On the keynote stage at re:Invent 2017, Andy Jassy introduces AWS Fargate to the world, followed by a deep dive by Werner Vogels and Abby Fuller and an introductory post.

January 2019: AWS Fargate responded to customer feedback regarding service cost, and aggressively reduced services costs by up to 50% and put AWS Fargate within the reach of more customers.

December 2019: AWS Fargate expanded container orchestrator support to include the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which brought serverless pods to the growing Kubernetes ecosystem, introduced an AWS Fargate Spot for interruption tolerant workloads with up to a 70% discount, and launched a service for the new Savings Plans (i.e., a flexible pricing model that allows customers to save up to 72%).

December 2020: Customers deploying AWS Batch learned that they can now run their processing jobs entirely serverless with AWS Fargate, which paired the convenience of serverless containers with parallel processing.

February 2021: Default service quotas were raised to 1,000 Tasks, which doubled the previous quota of 500 raised less than 6 months prior, as AWS Fargate continued to invest in a seamless experience to run workloads at scale.

Fall 2021: Two new workload types come into AWS Fargate with support for easier management of .NET Framework applications in Windows containers and Graviton2, which provided up to 40% better price-performance.

April 2022: Performance when scaling out applications was improved by 16x, by enhancing AWS Fargate’s ability to respond more quickly to fluctuating changes in capacity demands all without any changes required from customers’ configurations.

September 2022: AWS Fargate quadrupled available sizes, which provided up to 16 vCPUs and 120 GB memory to power larger workloads than ever.

Looking to the future

From its inception, AWS Fargate has listened earnestly to customers to prioritize capabilities and features that provide value to end users. A few areas of investment for the service that are in development:

• Continued expansion of supported workload types. Customers regularly comment that “we love the Fargate operational experience, but we want to use it with workload [X]!” Identifying and bringing more workloads types such as Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) support are being actively investigated.
• Improved performance and consistency. Immense progress has been made over the past year in AWS Fargate’s ability to scale to meet customer needs, and we will continue to invest in modernizing the underlying fleets powering AWS Fargate and driving down the start time for containers through innovations such as the open sourced SOCI project.

The future for AWS Fargate is bright, as we continue to seek ways to provide value to organizations who rely on the benefits of serverless containers. We encourage you to engage directly with the AWS Fargate service team through the public AWS Container Services Roadmap on GitHub to keep tabs on upcoming features and influence the future of AWS Fargate.

Getting started with serverless containers

Get started today deploying your first containerized workload on AWS Fargate by visiting our tutorials, documentation, and interactive Amazon Elastic Containers Service (Amazon ECS) Workshop exercises.

If you’re attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas from November 28 through December 2, 2022, then stop by the AWS Fargate booth and say hello!