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AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
44
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
17
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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Subrata Mukherjee - PeerSpot reviewer
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features include the availability of various services like compute, memory, and database services in the AWS landscape."
"It's good performance-wise."
"It has the best auto-scaling features."
"The solution incorporates ease of maintenance and reduction in operational overhead and costs. Patching is also easy."
"Most of what I've deployed are CI/CD pipelines. AWS is scalable. You can always increase or adjust the resources to meet the specific requirements. I also like choosing an instance in any location, preferably the closest one. We don't have any AWS locations in South Africa, but the latency is about the same as hosting in Europe."
"The documentation is good."
"Can handle traffic spikes so the system doesn't overload."
"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."
"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."
"If you create your deployment with a good set of rules for how to scale in, you can just set it and forget it."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ability to run on demand without the constant run time of basic resources."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can provide more discounts when using the machines the solution uses."
"The tool must provide proper guidelines to troubleshoot connectivity issues."
"I would like to see the security portal improved in the future."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"The support to manage the processes could be better."
"It's an expensive solution."
"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."
"AWS Fargate could improve the privileged mode containers. We had some problems and they were not able to run."
"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."
"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."
"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."
"Sometimes, Fargate can be really hard to configure."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing depends on the traffic and workload."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Its price is affordable for enterprise customers."
"When we want to use more services, we need to pay more. It's a monthly subscription, rather than licensed-based. Pricing or fees for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could be improved."
"The product is expensive."
"Pricing could be a little bit more competitive."
"The solution is not expensive."
"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."
"I rate the price of AWS Fargate a four out of five."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

AWS RAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.