Slalom First Look \\\ AWS Fargate

Amazon Web Service’s serverless container orchestration solution

First, look back…

Container based architecture has changed the way we think about utilizing compute resources. We can now take full advantage of the power the CPU and memory provides by packaging up applications and running them at scale as one of several potential isolated processes working on a single server.

Gone are the days where you have dedicated servers meticulously configured to support a single application. Or worse, a single server operating system hosting multiple applications and all are at the mercy of the configuration for that server. With container tools, like Docker, you can leverage containers to specify the exact system specification your app requires while running alongside several other identical or different containers on the same resource. Heck, they don’t even need to be running on the same operating system.

The challenge now is managing the container hosts and containers deployed on them. Even with the market orchestration tools there is still substantial overhead and cost involved in doing this.

My First Take

Think of AWS Fargate as a serverless implementation for managing containers. All of that overhead of managing compute resources goes away. You simply provide a container image, the policies for the application and scaling configuration and Amazon will take care of the rest. Right-sizing, determining instance types, and scaling all are no longer your worry.

The beautiful thing here is Fargate is essentially built on top of AWS’s existing container Elastic Container Service (ECS). With Fargate you use the combined facility of orchestration and scheduling with the ease of a ‘serverless’ architecture and now you have a really powerful tool to run at full scale.

Taking the First Steps

What are your first steps and barriers to entry? Well, the answer is… it depends.

Depending on how far along into a microservice and container architecture you are, investment here could range from rearchitecting applications to containerizing applications to deploying a container strategy. To do that, you will need application engineers familiar with microservice patterns as well as engineers to develop and create the container images.

That is the worst case barrier to entry. However, if you’ve already made investments in those areas and you’re using platforms like Kubernetes or ECS to manage your fleet, it’s a short jump to start using Fargate. A jump that is one worth making for not much extra investment.

Fargate integrates with ECS out of the box, and if you’re a Kubernetes shop, you don’t have to abandon that investment. The new ECS for Kubernetes service (EKS) will have the same integration later in 2018.

For further reading on containers and microservice architectures on AWS see this post from AWS and this post from Slalom’s Ivan Campos