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I love AWS, I really do and I thought about using fargate because the promise of not managing your “cattle-like” servers is wonderful but they need to get the p

by tbrock 7y ago

I love AWS, I really do and I thought about using fargate because the promise of not managing your “cattle-like” servers is wonderful but they need to get the pricing within this stratosphere for it to not be a complete joke. I actually really like ECS and aware of how much time it would save me (a lot) and how much terraform I could delete (a ton) and it’s still not even close to worth it. Amazon usually nails this sort of thing, surprising that despite the operational value it provides nobody seems to be using it.

roadofbones 7y ago
I wish my company could use it, we run a bunch of standard up ECS clusters, and it'd be nice to not have to provision and maintain servers. Fargate wasn't worth it due to the price difference, and just how rigidly they enforce cpu and memory quantization.
helpPeople 7y ago
Amazon has become the vilian with pricing.
solidasparagus 7y ago
Pricing is fine for small things (most people's side project, etc). Fargate still feels very young and I don't think it handles very high scale or resource intensive work all that well/affordably. I think that will come in time. From a cloud provider PoV, Fargate is a very hard problem - like Lambda except harder because the container might need to run forever.
airocker 7y ago
I believe vendor lock-in and lack of incremental value over EKS are the reasons. The amount of flexibility we lose by using Fargate is not compensated well enough by the ease of use offered.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  What lock-in? I'm genuinely curious, I can't imagine it would be hard at all to move my service from Fargate to anything else. It's just docker containers and DNS, I haven't done anything Fargate specific.
  - pbalau 7y ago
    These days "vendor lock-in" seems to be code word for "have no idea how this thing works".
  - tilolebo 7y ago
    Seems like vendor lock-in is the new term for "Not Invented Here". I also fail to see how Fargate locks you in: as you say, it's just docker and DNS, with a sprinkle of environment variables if you use it with SSM Parameter Store.
  - llarsson 7y ago
    I assume what is referred to is rather of the "we have built all this internal tooling, release pipelines and processes, internal know-how even among non-developers" etc that any technology choice is accompanied by. These effectively lock you in and costs real money to replace.
    - tilolebo 7y ago
      I get that, although in many cases the AWS-specific tooling needed to build and deploy services running on Fargate is minimal. It's basically logging in to ECR and triggering an ECS service update (2 API calls). I voluntarily keep out the networking and IAM parts out, as I believe they are also needed for a Kubernetes cluster. What I don't get is that many people seem to think that they are lock-in free just by choosing Kubernetes. But: 1. Kubernetes itself is a very, very opinionated piece of software. You are not free, you have to go the Kubernetes way. 2. The overhead of learning and maintaining Kubernetes is real, compared to a more managed solution like Fargate. 3. If you use Kubernetes, you still have to set up the underlying infrastructure. This infra is still vendor specific. If you go for a managed Kubernetes like GKE or EKS, you still have to deal with a vendor-specific API.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I PoCed EKS for our company. Significant issues we experienced vs Fargate were that EKS had no sane logging story out of the box--you had to build it yourself. Worse, EKS didn't integrate with IAM and we couldn't figure out a sane workaround. These issues are more-or-less addressed on the containers roadmap, so things are improving, but there's good reason to use Fargate. Also, I can't imagine feeling "locked in" to Fargate; porting to Kubernetes is pretty straightforward unless you depend on some isolation property provided by Fargate.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You’re always locked into your infrastructure once you get to any sort of meaningful scale and when you are trying to “prevent lock-in” you’re probably spending more time in engineering effort instead of taking advantage of your vendors feature. That’s just like all of the software developers using the repository pattern just in case their CTO decides to move from their six figure Oracle installation to Postgres. The cost of moving away from your chosen vendor is usually not worth the cost, doesn’t have the ROI, and not worth the business risks of regressions.
staticassertion 7y ago
To be fair, Fargate today is a lot cheaper than Fargate at release. The work on Firecracker had a significant impact I believe. Still, I'm with you. I use Fargate for my open source project but I fully expect teams using it to eventually move to EC2 and manage the cluster directly in order to save money. It is easily, by far, the most expensive part of my pipeline.
atmosx 7y ago
I did an evaluation at release time, and as you said, the pricing model was a complete joke.
gsdf 7y ago
Disclosure: I work in AWS. First thanks for the feedback. We are listening closely and feedback (critical or otherwise) really helps us focus on what to build. We think of Fargate as simplicity, without compromising on capability. We don’t want price to be a barrier for customers to realize simpler operations models. We are thinking through additional pricing options for customers. We use open source where it matters for our customers and partners. For instance, we recently launched a new capability called FireLens (in preview) that uses Fluentd and Fluent Bit to help partners use a standard codebase and to help developers realize cost savings on logs. WRT lock in comments on this thread, I was a startup product manager in my past life. What really mattered to us was speed of execution and keeping our costs in control. Choose a product that helps you realize those goals (if they resonate with you), whether it is Kubernetes or ECS/Fargate.

by tbrock 7y ago

roadofbones 7y ago

I wish my company could use it, we run a bunch of standard up ECS clusters, and it'd be nice to not have to provision and maintain servers. Fargate wasn't worth it due to the price difference, and just how rigidly they enforce cpu and memory quantization.

helpPeople 7y ago

Amazon has become the vilian with pricing.

solidasparagus 7y ago

Pricing is fine for small things (most people's side project, etc). Fargate still feels very young and I don't think it handles very high scale or resource intensive work all that well/affordably. I think that will come in time. From a cloud provider PoV, Fargate is a very hard problem - like Lambda except harder because the container might need to run forever.

airocker 7y ago

I believe vendor lock-in and lack of incremental value over EKS are the reasons. The amount of flexibility we lose by using Fargate is not compensated well enough by the ease of use offered.

staticassertion 7y ago
What lock-in? I'm genuinely curious, I can't imagine it would be hard at all to move my service from Fargate to anything else. It's just docker containers and DNS, I haven't done anything Fargate specific.
- pbalau 7y ago
  These days "vendor lock-in" seems to be code word for "have no idea how this thing works".
- tilolebo 7y ago
  Seems like vendor lock-in is the new term for "Not Invented Here". I also fail to see how Fargate locks you in: as you say, it's just docker and DNS, with a sprinkle of environment variables if you use it with SSM Parameter Store.
- llarsson 7y ago
  I assume what is referred to is rather of the "we have built all this internal tooling, release pipelines and processes, internal know-how even among non-developers" etc that any technology choice is accompanied by. These effectively lock you in and costs real money to replace.
  - tilolebo 7y ago
    I get that, although in many cases the AWS-specific tooling needed to build and deploy services running on Fargate is minimal. It's basically logging in to ECR and triggering an ECS service update (2 API calls). I voluntarily keep out the networking and IAM parts out, as I believe they are also needed for a Kubernetes cluster. What I don't get is that many people seem to think that they are lock-in free just by choosing Kubernetes. But: 1. Kubernetes itself is a very, very opinionated piece of software. You are not free, you have to go the Kubernetes way. 2. The overhead of learning and maintaining Kubernetes is real, compared to a more managed solution like Fargate. 3. If you use Kubernetes, you still have to set up the underlying infrastructure. This infra is still vendor specific. If you go for a managed Kubernetes like GKE or EKS, you still have to deal with a vendor-specific API.
weberc2 7y ago
I PoCed EKS for our company. Significant issues we experienced vs Fargate were that EKS had no sane logging story out of the box--you had to build it yourself. Worse, EKS didn't integrate with IAM and we couldn't figure out a sane workaround. These issues are more-or-less addressed on the containers roadmap, so things are improving, but there's good reason to use Fargate. Also, I can't imagine feeling "locked in" to Fargate; porting to Kubernetes is pretty straightforward unless you depend on some isolation property provided by Fargate.
scarface74 7y ago
You’re always locked into your infrastructure once you get to any sort of meaningful scale and when you are trying to “prevent lock-in” you’re probably spending more time in engineering effort instead of taking advantage of your vendors feature. That’s just like all of the software developers using the repository pattern just in case their CTO decides to move from their six figure Oracle installation to Postgres. The cost of moving away from your chosen vendor is usually not worth the cost, doesn’t have the ROI, and not worth the business risks of regressions.

staticassertion 7y ago

To be fair, Fargate today is a lot cheaper than Fargate at release. The work on Firecracker had a significant impact I believe. Still, I'm with you. I use Fargate for my open source project but I fully expect teams using it to eventually move to EC2 and manage the cluster directly in order to save money. It is easily, by far, the most expensive part of my pipeline.

atmosx 7y ago

I did an evaluation at release time, and as you said, the pricing model was a complete joke.

gsdf 7y ago

Disclosure: I work in AWS. First thanks for the feedback. We are listening closely and feedback (critical or otherwise) really helps us focus on what to build. We think of Fargate as simplicity, without compromising on capability. We don’t want price to be a barrier for customers to realize simpler operations models. We are thinking through additional pricing options for customers. We use open source where it matters for our customers and partners. For instance, we recently launched a new capability called FireLens (in preview) that uses Fluentd and Fluent Bit to help partners use a standard codebase and to help developers realize cost savings on logs. WRT lock in comments on this thread, I was a startup product manager in my past life. What really mattered to us was speed of execution and keeping our costs in control. Choose a product that helps you realize those goals (if they resonate with you), whether it is Kubernetes or ECS/Fargate.