[NathanKP]

AWS employee here. Sorry to hear that you feel ECS is half baked. Feel free to reach out directly using the details in my profile info if you have any feedback you'd like me pass on to the team.

To clear up the confusion on the relationship between Fargate and ECS, think of Fargate as the hosting layer: it runs your container for you on demand and bills you for the amount of CPU and GB your container reserved per second. On the other hand ECS is the management layer. It provides the API that you use to orchestrate launching X containers, spreading them across availability zones, and hooking them up to other resources automatically (like load balancers, service discovery, etc).

Currently you can use ECS without using Fargate, by providing your own pool of EC2 instances to host the containers on. However, you can not use Fargate without ECS, as the hosting layer doesn't know how to run your full application stack without being instructed to by the ECS management layer.

[pram]

From my perspective Fargate offers the functionality I would have expected from ECS in the first place. What ECS provides OOB requires too much janitoring and ultimately isn't terribly different in effort compared to running your own k8s or mesos infra on EC2 instances you provisioned yourself. You still basically needed an orchestration layer over ECS.

Which is why, I assume, Fargate is now listed as an integral feature of ECS on the product page.

[NathanKP]

Yeah to be clear the Fargate container hosting was always the vision for ECS, from the very first internal proposal to build this system. But its necessary to build something that keeps track of container state at scale first, and that is ECS. We built ECS so that it can keep track of container state both in Fargate and containers running on your own self managed EC2 hosts. This gives you the most flexibility if you have really specific needs for your container hosts that Fargate can't cover for you.