# AWS Fargate

10 Hacker News commenters recommended AWS Fargate and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Fargate for running containers without managing servers, patching or scaling, especially for small workloads. Critics say it is complex and costly at small sizes.

## Why people recommend it

- No servers, patching or scaling to manage (2 comments): "ECS fargate is a must as well because no "server" means a ton less compliance burden" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755517)) "no servers to manage, no patching, no scaling headaches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821449))
- Good fit for small workloads (2 comments): "fargate if your just running a few containers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877345)) "if workload is small this will do the most." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752986))
- Works alongside Lambda and ECS (2 comments): "I've deployed Rust binaries to both Lambda and Fargate in AWS and they've been very performant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109060)) "I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478967))

## What people warn about

- Complex, hard to set up (3 comments): "I still have battle scars from trying to set up AWS Fargate. It's just a hodge podge of corporately requested features at this point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947370)) "Fargate (with Firecracker/Docker) is hellishly complex and forces you into all sorts of AWS BS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697058)) "I find them just as complicated as k8s." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548654))
- Costly at smallest sizes (2 comments): "Wait until you run the smallest Fargate capacities and then Container Insights costs more in CloudWatch than your infrastructure costs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949047)) "Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right? So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085179))
- Slow to start tasks (2 comments): "we went from a ~3 minute startup in fargate to ~30 seconds with the ASG" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955669)) "Fargate takes minutes to launch while Lambda takes a second or less." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691100))
- Does not scale to zero (2 comments): "It doesn't automatically scale to 0 like Cloud Run and Container Apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50086103)) "Fargate, just like ECS, doesn't natively scale to zero." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070386))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Google Cloud Run](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-cloud-run.md): 38 recommend
- [Amazon ECS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-ecs.md): 34 recommend
- [Cloudflare Containers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-containers.md): 9 recommend
- [AWS ECS Fargate](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-ecs-fargate.md): 9 recommend
- [Azure Container Apps](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-container-apps.md): 6 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "AWS Fargate", https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-fargate/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).