Celebrating 5 Years of AWS Fargate!

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As AWS Fargate marks its fifth anniversary, it has solidified its role as a critical platform for organizations looking to embrace containerized applications without the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure. Its serverless compute capabilities, combined with a distinctive security model that encapsulates each container within a virtual machine, have garnered significant trust from diverse organizations. From major financial institutions to startups, AWS Fargate has enabled users to focus on innovation and business growth rather than the complexities of infrastructure management.

Today, notable companies like Goldman Sachs and Vanguard rely on AWS Fargate to support a wide range of workloads—ranging from basic websites and batch processing jobs to advanced tasks such as training natural language processing models, performing complex financial analyses, and managing large-scale insurance claims. Increasingly, Amazon teams are choosing AWS Fargate to build and even redesign their services to leverage the advantages of serverless containers.

Key Milestones Achieved

The robust platform that AWS Fargate is today has been shaped by numerous enhancements and significant milestones.

• November 2017: Andy Jassy introduced AWS Fargate at re:Invent 2017, followed by detailed presentations from Werner Vogels and Abby Fuller.
• January 2019: In response to user feedback, AWS Fargate slashed service costs by up to 50%, making it accessible to a broader audience.
• December 2019: AWS Fargate broadened its support for container orchestrators by integrating with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), offering serverless pods to the Kubernetes ecosystem. Additionally, AWS Fargate Spot was launched, offering up to a 70% discount for interruption-tolerant workloads, along with a flexible pricing model through new Savings Plans.
• December 2020: AWS Batch users discovered they could execute their processing tasks entirely serverless using AWS Fargate, enhancing the convenience of serverless containers with parallel processing capabilities.
• February 2021: Service quotas were increased to 1,000 tasks, doubling the previous limit of 500, as AWS Fargate continued to enhance the experience of running workloads at scale.
• Fall 2021: Two new workload types were introduced, facilitating smoother management of .NET Framework applications in Windows containers and harnessing Graviton2 technology for up to 40% improved price-performance.
• April 2022: AWS Fargate’s performance for scaling applications improved by 16 times, enabling quicker responses to changes in capacity demand, without requiring any configuration adjustments from customers.
• September 2022: AWS Fargate quadrupled its available sizes, offering up to 16 vCPUs and 120 GB of memory, supporting larger workloads than ever before.

Looking Ahead

Since its launch, AWS Fargate has prioritized user feedback, focusing on enhancing capabilities and features that deliver real value. Some planned enhancements include:

• Expanding supported workload types. Customers often express their satisfaction with the Fargate operational experience but desire compatibility with additional workloads. Research is ongoing to incorporate more types, such as Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) support.
• Enhancing performance and reliability. Significant advancements have been made in AWS Fargate’s scaling capabilities over the past year, and further investments are planned to modernize the infrastructure powering AWS Fargate and decrease container start times, utilizing innovations like the open-sourced SOCI project.

The future of AWS Fargate looks promising as we aim to provide continued value to organizations leveraging the benefits of serverless containers. We invite you to interact with the AWS Fargate service team via the public AWS Container Services Roadmap on GitHub to stay updated on upcoming features and to contribute your insights.

Getting Started with Serverless Containers

Begin your journey by deploying your first containerized workload on AWS Fargate through our comprehensive tutorials, documentation, and interactive Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Workshop exercises. For those attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas from November 28 to December 2, 2022, make sure to visit the AWS Fargate booth to connect with the team!

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