Fargate lets you run containers without having to think about the underlying VMs. You say how much CPU and mem you want the container to run with and off it goe

Fargate lets you run containers without having to think about the underlying VMs. You say how much CPU and mem you want the container to run with and off it goes. Kubernetes is a container orchestrator. If you have a k8s cluster, you can launch a container with a specified amount of memory (and I believe CPUs) and it will look much like Fargate. However, someone needs to manage the underlying hardware/VMs for the cluster as well as the cluster software/updates (k8s version, various k8s addons/operators, etc). With k8s, you will also need to make sure that you are using resources effectively (total resources required by containers == total resource available on the VMs in the k8s cluster), which is particularly challenging if you are launching new containers often. If you are using a cloud k8s offering (EKS, AKS, GKE, etc) then some or all of the VM management will be handled by the cloud provider, but the software management and resource utilization work will still be up to you. TLDR Fargate and k8s can be used very similarly, but k8s has a much higher ops/management burden. K8s was designed to do many more things than Fargate and, while that is sometimes great, it comes with a large ops/complexity cost.