Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. AWS Fargate

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
$0.01
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
AWS Fargate
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that allows the user to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate there is no need to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers.
$0
*per hour
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Editions & Modules
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Carrier IP Addresses
$0.005 - $0.10
T4g Instances
$0.04
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
T2, T3 Instances
$0.05 ($0.096)
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
Fargate Spot per GB
$0.00138679
*per hour
per GB
$0.004445
*per hour
Fargate Spot per vCPU
$0.01262932
*per hour
per vCPU
$0.04048
*per hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details*based on US East rates. Price varies region to region.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.1
18 Ratings
11% above category average
AWS Fargate
7.1
1 Ratings
13% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.617 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings2.01 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.117 Ratings6.01 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Automation8.47 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Small Businesses
Linode
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)AWS Fargate
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
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Amazon AWS
If you need to deploy Docker containers, Amazon Fargate is a very good fit. It integrates very well with other AWS services like RDS, EFS, and Secrets manager. You can have a very robust application using those services. In case you have many containers to deploy, it is however more expensive
that if you use other services like ECS or EKS, since they allow you to
share the same infrastructure to deploy multiple containers.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
  • The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
  • The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
  • UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
  • Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Usability
Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.
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Amazon AWS
It's a very practical service to use. If you need to deploy any application with a Database, disk storage, you're pretty much set.
Everything around that can be taken care of using other AWS services. Like secrets manager, certificate manager, RDS ...
And the CI/CD part is also very easy to setup, you only need on AWS CLI command to trigger a deployment, and done !
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
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Amazon AWS
AWS provides different support tiers. They are usually very reactive and are able to help solve the issues very quickly.
As for everything, the higher the support tier you get, the better and faster support you get.
If you're also a part of big company, you probably have solution architects at your disposal to help you with any inqueries.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Azure VM and Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
Pricing and billing of AWS Fargate is loosely tied to your exisiting AWS billing. You're unlikely to only use Fargate in your AWS subscription, so you get billed for everything alltoghter.
Fargate is naturally a bit more expensive that usuel docker services, but with careful planning and architecturing, you can have a very manageable cost.
You can also rely on Saving plans to reduce your bill.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
  • AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
  • EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
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