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by shitlord 1407 days ago
I use DynamoDB, Lambda, Fargate, and a few other services for a side business. I don't want to spend my time fiddling around with a database or EC2 instances. I'm able to run everything I need for under $100 a month without a lot of overhead, which I think is a good value. This may change as the business grows.

I can't complain about DynamoDB or Lambda pricing. Fargate is a little expensive for what we are running, but the infrastructure management tradeoff still makes it worthwhile.
1 comments
OJFord 1407 days ago
> Fargate is a little expensive for what we are running

Because of low usage? Lambda supports containers now (as of 2021 I think) so if you have a container to run (or something you could containerise) it's a relatively straightforward usage question which of Lambda/Fargate/EC2 makes sense on price. Lambda doesn't have to complicate comparison by being a completely different architecture/setup any more.

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shitlord 1407 days ago
No, the cost of a Fargate vCPU is just higher compared to EC2. An EC2 t3.small instance costs about 2 cents/hour and a similar configuration on Fargate costs about 9 cents/hour. For m6i.large and c6i.large instances, the disparity isn't as bad but it's still 15%-20% more expensive.

There are a few different reasons we're using Fargate. Like the other commenter mentioned, there's the lambda max run time. Our Fargate tasks also have a few sidecar containers running alongside the main services. The ECS Exec integration is also nice for poking around when things aren't working correctly.

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OJFord 1407 days ago
Of course it is, if it were cheaper then it would always win over EC2 for container workloads.

This is why I said it's a matter of usage - it's worth paying more per unit time if it's running less and more sporadically making it cheaper over all.

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shitlord 1406 days ago
I don't disagree about usage, but a 300% upcharge over a burstable EC2 instance is not reasonable from a pricing perspective.

Fargate should allow users to specify their compute requirements beyond just vCPU count and GB memory.

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arinlen 1407 days ago
> Lambda supports containers now (...)

The usecases for Fargate vs Lambda are not the same. For instance, Fargate is mainly intended for servers/long-running applications, whereas Lambdas have a hard runtime cap of 15min.

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OJFord 1407 days ago
Why is that incompatible with it being a matter of usage, as I said?

Lambda makes sense when usage is a small fraction of the day; 'long-running applications' are not that.

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