AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8, while AWS Fargate is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling holds a 11.2% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 15.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of AWS Fargate users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Read 44 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling reviews

1,768 Views
1,531 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 16 AWS Fargate reviews

3,700 Views
2,137 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

AWS Fargate

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

AWS Fargate and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling compete in the cloud computing space, with each offering unique advantages. AWS Fargate is praised for its convenience and scalability without the need for server management, making it attractive for teams lacking deep DevOps skills. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling stands out for its flexibility and high availability, which are crucial for dynamic environments requiring precise server management and scaling.

Features: AWS Fargate offers a serverless compute engine for containers with self-managed scaling, ideal for variable workloads. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and enables ease of scaling without managing underlying infrastructure. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provides significant elasticity, allows custom configurations of networks and VPCs, and integrates with load balancers for high availability. It scales resources based on demand and uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, adding value to its flexibility.

Room for Improvement: AWS Fargate has higher costs and is complex to set up for smaller clients or those needing detailed infrastructure control, presenting challenges in multi-container support and integration with current setups. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, while stable, faces challenges with complex pricing and configuration setups. There are constraints when independently scaling resources and a demand for clearer documentation and improved support for vertical scaling.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Fargate is mostly used in Public Cloud setups, offering ease of deployment due to its simplicity and automated services. Customer support is generally satisfactory, though proactive engagement is noticed more in premium plans. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is flexible for both Public and Private Cloud deployments, though support experiences are mixed, indicating potential for better personalized assistance and clearer guidance.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Fargate is regarded as costlier, especially for startups on tight budgets; however, it delivers a positive ROI for scalable operations. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is generally seen as more cost-effective than alternatives like Azure, with a pay-as-you-go model supporting varied workload needs efficiently, though complex pricing outlines often require strategic management for optimal outcomes.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Ranking in Compute Service

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Fargate

Ranking in Compute Service

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 11.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 15.0%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

Erick Karanja

Technical Lead at Cellulant Kenya

Scaling is as easy as hitting a button and setup is straightforward

AWS has already made improvements. In the past, if you provisioned a large EC2 instance and underutilized it, you still paid a premium. Now, AWS encourages using Kubernetes, where you primarily pay for the compute power you actually use in production. There is room for improvement. You might end up paying a high price if you're not careful and you provision a server that's underutilized. AWS has left it to engineers to figure out solutions. If you find the cost too high, you can move to Kubernetes, which might be a better solution for you than large EC2 instances. So, the improvements need to come from the user side, not the provider. Software engineers and engineering teams need to know their limits with EC2 instances. They need to recognize when it's time to transition their applications to Kubernetes. This means building with the cloud in mind from the start, making it easier to move solutions to the cloud without suffering upgrades and integration issues.

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Subrata Mukherjee

Senior Technical Architect; Head of Platform at Blenheim Chalcot IT Services India

Boost demand response with cost-efficient serverless architecture

We are a venture builder company, and if we select AWS for our product. Our design is based on a serverless architecture model. ECS Fargate is the most convenient way in terms of scalability, integration, and cost control Thanks to the serverless model and easy integration features, a few…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Applications deployed on EC2 instances can easily integrate with other AWS services. For example, you can connect your EC2 Auto Scaling group to a tool like CloudWatch for health checks and anomaly detection."

"The product's most valuable features are high availability and persistence."

"The integration capabilities are good."

"The tool helps me to process large data sets while scaling up."

"With the ability to set up rules based on demand, network, or traffic, the service offers a necessary level of adaptability."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is scaling your intra based on the request. Additionally, you are able to map the solution with any load balancer, such as public or private load balancers."

"The monitoring tool is helpful."

"The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool eliminates the need for hardware. We can choose what we need and pay as we use it. It is flexible and can integrate with any product."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling pros

"AWS Fargate has many valuable services. It does the job with minimal trouble. It's very observable. You can see what's going on and you have logs. You have everything. You can troubleshoot it. It's affordable and it's flexible."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."

"All AWS services allow me to manage a wide range of applications and services."

"AWS Fargate is an easy-to-use tool to simplify setup. You only pay for the resources you use. If you need to quickly create, delete, or scale applications without managing resources like EC2 instances, Fargate is the best service to use."

"Fargate's integration with other AWS services is really good."

"AWS Fargate is a fully managed service, and it's very easy to use compared to other services like Elastic Beanstalk Service (EBS)."

"Fargate is beneficial for hosting our solutions and providing workflow management, creating legal documents, and delivering business intelligence."

"If you create your deployment with a good set of rules for how to scale in, you can just set it and forget it."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"The solution could improve by having more automation. Nowadays there is a vast variety of automation. Additionally, infrastructure monitoring could improve."

"I would like to see a feature included that has the capability to clone when an instance is being terminated."

"There is room for improvement. You might end up paying a high price if you're not careful and you provision a server that's underutilized."

"The pricing could be reduced."

"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could improve by adding better integration features with the other services. Additionally, if the alarms could be triggered from other services this would be beneficial."

"We have found that the sizing in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is far off. For example, we will see some at one terabyte and the other one is two terabytes. There is nothing between one and two terabytes. Sometimes it's a struggle if I need one and a half, I still am supposed to pay for two. There are five terabytes, six terabytes, and 12 terabytes, and if I need something at eight or nine, I'm still paying 30 to 40 percent more by taking the one which is 12 terabytes. Microsoft Azure does similar sizes but the gap can be more, such as six terabytes, and the next one is 12 terabytes."

"The price could always be a bit better."

"There should be an AWS instance in South Africa, where the latency would be even lower. It might happen soon since AWS has recently opened more data centres in Nigeria. AWS may extend its reach to South Africa, and offer hosted CLI servers there. Most of the problems with AWS are not to do with the solution itself but with configuration. It is something on design, more or less."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling cons

"I heard from my team that it's not easy to predict the cost. That is the only issue we have with AWS Fargate, but I think that's acceptable. AWS Fargate isn't user-friendly. Anything related to Software as a Service or microservice architecture is not easy to implement. You're required to have DevOps from your side to implement the solution. AWS Fargate is just a temporary solution for us. When we grow to a certain level, we may use AKS for better control."

"We would like to see some improvement in the process documents that are provided with this product, particularly for auto-scaling and other configuration tools that are a bit complicated."

"AWS Fargate could improve the privileged mode containers. We had some problems and they were not able to run."

"If there are any options to manage containers, that would be good. That relates more to the cost point. For example, over the next three months, I'll be making a comparison between solutions like CAST AI and other software-as-a-service platforms that offer Kubernetes management with an emphasis on cost reduction."

"There are features that could be added or enhanced."

"As I have not worked with Fargate extensively, I do not have any specific improvements."

"I would like to see enhanced faster application scaling and better integration with the elastic file system to unify storage volumes and improve the launch time of instances."

"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model."

"Its price is affordable for enterprise customers."

"The price of this product could be a little bit lower."

"As far back as I can remember, I have experience with two types of subscriptions. The first was my personal AWS base, and the second was a corporate license. I can't say much about the corporate license, but I recall they sent the bill every month for the personal subscription, though I could be mistaken."

"The product's pricing depends on the traffic and workload."

"The product is quite expensive."

"The solution pricing varies by service region is mid-range."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling pricing and cost advice

"We would advise that this solution has a slightly-higher price point than others on the market. There is a free plan available for start-ups, but the free and lower range licensing models do not provide the full functionality."

"I rate the price of AWS Fargate a four out of five."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Government

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool e...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

The pricing structure from AWS is really complex and depends on factors like the region and specific services used. Prices can vary significantly even within the same service across different locat...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

There is a need for improvement in understanding the pricing structure, as it is complex and depends on several factors such as the location of data centers.

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Fargate?

The most valuable feature of Fargate is that it's self-managed. You don't have to configure your own clusters or deploy any Kubernetes clusters. This simplifies the initial deployment and scaling p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Fargate?

As I have not worked with Fargate extensively, I do not have any specific improvements.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?

AWS Fargate is easily manageable. We just need to create a cluster and focus on our infrastructure. Customers do not need to take downtime since everything is managed by AWS with no downtime. Overa...

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

March 2025

Download AWS Fargate product report

Also Known As

AWS RAM

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Overview

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define. ... Dynamic scaling responds to changing demand and predictive scaling automatically schedules the right number of EC2 instances based on predicted demand.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

A new compute engine that enables you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances. With Fargate, you don’t need to provision, configure, or scale virtual machines in your clusters to run containers. Fargate can be used with Amazon ECS today, with plans to support Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) in the future.

Fargate has flexible configuration options so you can closely match your application needs and granular, per-second billing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

January 2025

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