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AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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
7.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Fargate
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 10.3%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 13.4%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Awais Zahid - PeerSpot reviewer
Pay-as-you-go and efficient with automated workload handling
I have been working with customers who use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for handling their workload on servers and scaling up the infrastructure as required.  As an instructor and cloud consultant, I help clients maintain and scale their infrastructure using this service to achieve zero downtime…
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."
"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 most valuable features are that it is stable, flexible, and reliable."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"Service for launching or terminating Amazon EC2 instances, with good scalability and stability."
"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling has a cool-down time feature called the warmup start."
"Sometimes, Auto Scaling is more beneficial, and sometimes, Reserved Instances are preferred, especially for longer-term usage."
"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."
"By using a server's compute resources, one can observe the resource metrics. With AWS, one can determine when servers will be used based on CloudWatch results. For example, CloudWatch informs the application and service platform when the hit ratio has reached the threshold value."
"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."
"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."
"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 definitely impacted our organization positively because before that, we couldn't accommodate the workload requirements as flexibly as we can with Fargate."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ability to run on demand without the constant run time of basic resources."
 

Cons

"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."
"What could be improved in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is its fees."
"The pricing could be reduced."
"I would like to see a feature included that has the capability to clone when an instance is being terminated."
"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers various benefits but lacks certain features for fine-grained customization compared to other cloud providers like GCP. Users are constrained by predefined instance families in EC2 when selecting instance types for scaling. Unlike GCP, where users can independently scale resources such as memory or CPU, EC2 doesn't offer this flexibility."
"As we are transitioning to managing containerized applications, the solution could improve by adding more managed container services as a feature in the solution."
"The launch configuration feature doesn't work properly. It needs to improve the load configuration feature along with launch templates. The tool needs to tag feature as well."
"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."
"We faced challenges in vertically scaling our workload."
"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."
"Sometimes, Fargate can be really hard to configure."
"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."
"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."
"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."
"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."
"Challenges include higher costs for smaller clients, limited control over underlying infrastructure customization, and potential latencies during task startup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's cost-effective."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"There is no specific pricing for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, but we have to pay for the number of machines getting scaled up."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The solution pricing varies by service region is mid-range."
"The tool's pricing is good and not expensive."
"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."
"The product's pricing depends on the traffic and workload."
"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
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
6%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
8%
 

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 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...
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...
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?
Currently, I think that the program is great the way it is, and maybe we use less than 50% of the current features of the platform. For example, we have been evaluating Dask with Python to work wit...
What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?
My team hasn't used AWS Fargate's capability for automatic scaling in our applications, even when they knew about it; they were very new to using these features. AWS Fargate's security features wer...
 

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: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.