INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
AWS today quietly brought spot capacity to Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both the company Elastic
Container Service and, now, its Elastic Kubernetes service.
Like spot instances for the EC2 compute platform, Fargate Spot pricing is
significantly cheaper, both for storage and compute, than regular Fargate pricing
In return, though, you have to be able to accept the fact that your instance may get terminated when AWS needs additional capacity
While that means Fargate Spot may not be perfect for every workload, there are plenty of applications that can easily handle an
interruption.
&Fargate now has on-demand, savings plan, spot,& AWS VP of Compute Services Deepak Singh told me
&If you think about Fargate as a compute layer for, as we call it, serverless compute for containers, you now have the pricing worked out
and you now have both orchestrators on top of it.&
He also noted that containers already drive a significant percentage of spot usage on AWS
in general, so adding this functionality to Fargate makes a lot of sense (and may save users a few dollars here and there)
Pricing, of course, is the major draw here, and an hour of CPU time on Fargate Spot will only cost $0.01245364 (yes, AWS is pretty precise
there) compared to $0.04048 for the on-demand price,
With this, AWS is also launching another important new feature: capacity providers
The idea here is to automate capacity provisioning for Fargate and EC2, both of which now offer on-demand and spot instances, after all
You simply write a config file that, for example, says you want to run 70% of your capacity on EC2 and the rest on spot instances
The scheduler will then keep that capacity on spot as instances come and go, and if there are no spot instances available, it will move it
to on-demand instances and back to spot once instances are available again.
In the future, you will also be able to mix and match EC2 and
&You can say, I want some of my services running on EC2 on demand, some running on Fargate on demand, and the rest running on Fargate Spot,&
&And the scheduler manages it for you
You squint hard, capacity is capacity
We can attach other capacity providers.& Outpost, AWS& fully managed service for running AWS services in your data center, could be a
capacity provider, for example.
These new features and prices will be officially announced in Thursday re:Invent keynote, but the
documentation and pricing is already live today.
AWS announces EKS on Fargate is available
