At AWS re:Invent 2017, a new launch type for containers called Fargate was announced. This book is about Amazon Fargate, the new launch type for the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for Docker containers.
Docker is the de factostandard containerization framework that has revolutionized packaging and deployment of software. Amazon Fargate has made the ECS platform serverless; no EC2 instances to provision, run, or manage. Amazon Fargate runs ECS services on Docker containers and exposes the service tasks directly to the user. Fargate has much simplified the ECS platform by making it serverless.
Amazon Fargate provides the following benefits:
- It's supported on AWS ECS, with support to be added on AWS EKS
- It's fully integrated with the other AWS services, including IAM, CloudWatch Logs, and EC2 Load Balancing
- Amazon Fargate is serverless and reduces management of ECS clusters; no EC2 instances to provision, create, or manage
- ECS service tasks are directly exposed to user
- An Elastic Network Interface is created for each task
- There's support for the auto scaling of ECS tasks
- An ECS CLI is provided to create ECS clusters and deploy tasks with Docker Compose
Instead of launching ECS clusters on EC2 instances, Amazon Fargate launches clusters on the Fargate platform.
