That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison though, is it? I mean yeah, a cluster that you never power up costs nothing, that's what I would have hoped.
Assume that you are actually _doing something_ with the cluster, then there will be charges for vCPU and memory. The pricing on this page indicates that if you only need your containers for 10 minutes a day, every day, then you will pay $1.23 for the month at 2GB/1vCPU. That's pretty modest usage at a pretty modest cost.
Sure, you can do it, but... you may need to re-architect your product to take advantage of transient workers. (Now I think we all should do that, but that's another conversation...)
Compared to DigitalOcean's $10/mo (single-worker, managed) cluster, which provides one full-time node with the same specs, that you can slice-and-dice to run as many tasks as you can fit in 2GB of memory and a single vCPU. Now it becomes clearer that Fargate is priced at a premium. If I'm doing the math right, you'll pay $177.12 for that same task space with your Fargate cluster.
If your hobby project needs to run for more than a couple of hours a month, you will usually pay a lot more with Fargate.
> For example, your service uses 5 ECS Tasks, running for 10 minutes (600 seconds) every day for a month (30 days) where each ECS Task uses 1 vCPU and 2GB memory.
5 workers, at 10 minutes each. That's still $35 / $10 = 350% of the cost, and they're not full-time. The point was that Fargate is not priced to be the cheapest option, unless your product is designed specifically with Fargate in mind.
(And ok, not specifically Fargate, really any architecture that permits the workers to come and go, but mostly go.)
Fargate is a tool for a job, and in the suite of Amazon's offerings that includes Lambda, S3, CloudFront, you really can make some cool stuff for cheap, if you pay attention to what kind of resources it needs, and if it _really needs_ those resources, or maybe there's a cheaper offering that is a better fit, or at least that could do the job just as well.
Don't get me wrong! But if I want to take, say, my Ruby on Rails app and host it somewhere without reinventing my whole stack from scratch, I definitely won't use Lambda because any Rails app just won't fit the model very well, and I won't use Fargate because it's [N] integer times as expensive as comparable offerings.
If Fargate was capable of auto-scaling tasks to zero workers during periods of inactivity while remaining mostly responsive, like Lambda "cold start" vs "warm start", then it would be a much easier sell for me.
I started using fargate this last weekend. From a platform (not cost) perspective I have always liked GKE. Fargate is very AWS-ish. Kubernetes is pretty buried. The good news is I found a fargate CLI tool written in GO on github that is really nice. It’s called “fargate” but I don’t have the link handy.