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Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

Fargate seems like it's an in-between of Lambda and ECS. Lambda because it's pay-per-second on-demand functions being run (or in the case of Fargate, containers) and ECS because Fargate is ECS without having to worry about having the EC2 instances configured. I'm not sure where this falls in, but maybe developers were complaining about Lambda and wanted to just run containers instead of individual functions?

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Lambda has some limitations such as cold starts, 5 min max execution time, etc because it is designed for a much more granular operational model. Fargate is designed to run long running containers that could stay up for days or weeks, and always stay warm to respond to requests, so there is no cold start.

The way I think about it is temporal and spatial control, and giving up control over them so that some common entity can optimize and drive down your costs. With Fargate, you're giving up spatial control so you can just pay for the task resources you asked for. With Lambda, you're additionally giving up temporal control so you can just pay for resources when you're lambda is actually servicing a request.

When I think about the offerings this way, I can start to decide when I want to use them because now I can ask myself "Do I need strict temporal/spatial control over my application?" and "Do I think I can optimize temporal/spatial costs better than Lambda/Fargate?".

I assume as much; my contention is that that's not gonna really be worth it even to the people who think they want it. Not at this price.

It's Lambda with out the 5 minute limit.

Plus the ability to do custom containers. For some workloads, may be valuable.

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