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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
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
45
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

"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."
"Service for launching or terminating Amazon EC2 instances, with good scalability and stability."
"The support from Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is very good."
"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."
"The documentation is good."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the seamless resizing of web connection."
"The tool helps me to process large data sets while scaling up."
"The solution includes many features for configuring networks and VPCs."
"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 automatically scales to meet demand, making it ideal for applications with variable workloads."
"We appreciate the simple use of containers within this solution, it makes managing the containers quick and easy."
"Fargate's integration with other AWS services is really good."
"If you create your deployment with a good set of rules for how to scale in, you can just set it and forget it."
"All AWS services allow me to manage a wide range of applications and services."
"It allows for focusing on applications instead of managing infrastructure."
"Fargate is beneficial for hosting our solutions and providing workflow management, creating legal documents, and delivering business intelligence."
 

Cons

"The solution is not cheap."
"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."
"I would like to see the security portal improved in the future."
"The support to manage the processes could be better."
"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."
"For future improvements, I suggest focusing on cost reduction."
"We would like to see improvement in the UI for this solution, so that it is more user-friendly."
"The pricing could be reduced."
"I would like to see the older dashboard instead of the newer version. I don't like the new dashboard."
"We faced challenges in vertically scaling our workload."
"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon EC2 instances can be very expensive."
"The solution is not expensive."
"I rate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The solution's licensing is based on a pay-as-you-go model. You only pay for the resources you use, whether it's RAM, processing power, or storage. So, it's calculated based on the time you use those resources, typically billed in hours or minutes."
"The pricing is not fixed and it is based on usage."
"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."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"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%
University
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.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.