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 10.8% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 14.7% 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 46 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling reviews

1,632 Views
1,401 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 17 AWS Fargate reviews

3,381 Views
1,929 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

AWS Fargate

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

AWS Fargate and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling both compete in the cloud service category, aiming to streamline deployments for various enterprise needs. AWS Fargate seems to have the upper hand in user-friendly deployment and ease of use, while Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers greater control and flexibility for complex, customizable needs.

Features: AWS Fargate provides significant benefits by eliminating server management and Kubernetes clusters, appealing to those seeking simplicity, ease of deployment, scalability, and cost-efficiency for dynamic workloads. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers control with features like elasticity, integration capabilities, and customization for extensive operations across EC2 instances.

Room for Improvement: AWS Fargate is criticized for its cost and complexity, especially for enterprises without a dedicated DevOps team, with room for improvements in privileged mode and documentation. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could enhance its pricing model, resource customization, monitoring support, and documentation simplification for better use of customization features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Fargate is praised for user-friendly deployment in public and hybrid clouds, with high customer satisfaction and support for strategic alliances. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provides comprehensive support across private and public clouds with clear documentation. Fargate customers often do not need frequent support, while EC2 Auto Scaling users value robustness in diverse cloud settings.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Fargate is seen as cost-effective for enterprises with expected ROI in serverless operations, appearing expensive for smaller startups. Organizations benefit from simplified management and serverless scalability. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is moderately priced, emphasizing a pay-as-you-go model, offering flexibility and value for established enterprises despite potentially accumulating resource costs.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

April 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

9.0

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 April 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 10.8%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 14.7%, down from 17.7% 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

"The initial setup of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is easy...Since we are an enterprise-sized company and a client of Amazon, the response from the technical support team was immediate."

"Service for launching or terminating Amazon EC2 instances, with good scalability and stability."

"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 integration capabilities are good."

"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling has good integration."

"The auto-scaling feature is particularly useful. Additionally, CloudWatch and CloudTrail are also important features for us."

"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."

"One of the most important benefits is that a company can optimize resources because Auto Scaling deploys resources when needed. For example, for Black Friday, a company can deploy 100 servers for a couple of days. When Black Friday is over, the company can delete those servers."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling pros

"Fargate itself is a stable product. We are quite satisfied with its performance."

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

"It allows for focusing on applications instead of managing infrastructure."

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

"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."

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

"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 process."

"I like their containerization service. You can use Docker or something similar and deploy quickly without the know-how related to, for example, Kubernetes. If you use AKS or Kubernetes, then you have to have the know-how. But for Fargate, you don't need to have the know-how there. You just deploy the container or the image, and then you have the container, and you can use it as AWS takes care of the rest. This makes it easier for those getting started or if you don't have a strong DevOps team inside your organization."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"The licensing cost is expensive."

"EC2 is doing what it is intended to do, and I have no specific improvements to suggest."

"We would like to see improvement in the UI for this solution, so that it is more user-friendly."

"The price could always be a bit better."

"If your EC2 instance doesn't boot up, you're in the dark about what's happening. It would be amazing if you could get a view of the console to see the status. There's something called the AWS Console, which is a web portal. I would like to see a virtual screen of an instance that hasn't started properly, so I can see where it crashed."

"It should work for the cloud, cloud monitoring features, and DevOps processes. It should automatically enable features for downscaling and upscaling."

"It's an expensive solution."

"The support to manage the processes could be better."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling cons

"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."

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

"Sometimes, Fargate can be really hard to configure."

"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."

"Challenges include higher costs for smaller clients, limited control over underlying infrastructure customization, and potential latencies during task startup."

"There is a tool named Compose that helps in converting the Docker Compose file into a Kubernetes file. For ECS and Fargate, AWS reads a Dockerfile and helps with conversion. However, I am uncertain if it's ready for deployment after conversion."

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

"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."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling's pricing a seven out of ten."

"The product is cheap."

"I have not explored the price of the solution extensively, but from what I have seen the price is alright."

"Compared to the performance, the price is quite high. I would rate it a ten because it is expensive. There are additional costs including bandwidth costs, data transfer costs, and load balancing costs."

"Amazon EC2 instances can be very expensive."

"AWS offered some credits, so we have been able to enjoy some of those benefits. The pricing was fair."

"The tool's pricing is good and not expensive."

"The pricing is not fixed and it is based on usage."

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

26%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

25%

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...

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

The pricing of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is moderate. It's not too expensive because we only pay for what we use. While there are cheaper options, the services provided are worth the cost. Previously...

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What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

While Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is continually updated and has improved over time, the dashboard has become more complex and tricky for new users. The interface was easier to navigate in earlier vers...

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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?

The monitoring capabilities of AWS Fargate could be improved and made more robust. The error handling aspect sometimes causes issues and can get stuck during deployment, making the process not very...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?

I would recommend AWS Fargate as an alternative to AWS Lambda for running loads or hosting a service. It is a good service for keeping instances running, which minimizes initial latency. Overall, I...

See all answers

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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

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

April 2025

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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

April 2025

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