Scaling does take time, but you would normally scale based on resource utilization (like if CPU or RAM usage exceeded 70%). So unless you had a really large and

Scaling does take time, but you would normally scale based on resource utilization (like if CPU or RAM usage exceeded 70%). So unless you had a really large and abrupt spike in traffic, the new container would be up before it's actually needed. It's definitely not apples to apples with Lambda though--if you do have a very bursty workload, the cold start would be slower with Fargate, and you'd probably drop some requests too while scaling up. If your app allows for it, a pattern I like is Fargate for the main server with a Lambda failover. That way you avoid cold starts with normal traffic patterns, and can also absorb a big spike if needed.