Kubernetes and AWS Fargate both aim towards easing off the container orchestration process. The core feature of both is to deploy and manage containerized applications. In a way, Fargate seems to be an extension of upstream Kubernetes. Yet there exists some distinct differences which become the deciding factor when choosing one above the other.
What Is AWS Fargate?
AWS Fargate is a container orchestration engine introduced by AWS in 2017. Fargate follows a serverless approach of setting up and managing the infrastructure required to deploy and host containers (containerized applications). Fargate automatically provisions the infrastructure for your containers on a per-request basis.
Using Fargate developers need not worry about building the infrastructure or provisioning their own clusters. Each node of the infrastructure provided by Fargate runs in an isolated kernel and is securely isolated so that developers can concentrate on building their applications.
What Is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration engine originally developed by Google. With Kubernetes, you organize your applications in groups of containers, which run using the Docker engine, taking care of keeping your application running as you request. Kubernetes are deployment environment agnostic and can be installed in public or on-premise cloud.
Kubernetes offers a variety of automation and abstraction features like automated container deployment, horizontal and vertical scaling, load balancing, rollbacks, restarting failed containers. AWS comes with its own managed Kubernetes service, Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), to manage, deploy, and scale Kubernetes clusters.
Relation Between AWS Fargate and Kubernetes
As stated earlier in this article, Fargate and Kubernetes though similar in aim are little different from each other. While Kubernetes is more like a container orchestration tool, Fargate is a container management platform and has greater scope of operation than Kubernetes.
Fargate manages infrastructure within EKS (an Amazon Kubernetes service platform). However, Fargate is not dependent on Kubernetes as it can deploy and manage containers via ECS (Elastic Container Service), another Amazon container orchestration tool. So Fargate can also be used to manage clusters outside Kubernetes.
ECS on Fargate Vs. EKS on Fargate
- ECS is AWS’ own container service and integrates better with the AWS ecosystem, including CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry).
- The ECS control panel is totally free while EKS is charged.
- EKS on the other hand uses Kubernetes, which supports easy migration to other platforms and alleviates the fear of vendor-lock-in.
- EKS offers the advantage of Kuberenetes-native scaling features like Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Cluster Autoscaler (CA).
- EKS allows you to easily run tooling and plugins developed by the Kubernetes open-source community.
- EKS supports EC2 spot instances using managed node groups that follow spot best practices and allow some pretty great cost savings.
AWS Fargate Vs. Kubernetes: Differences
Infrastructure Provisioning: Fargate sets up the infrastructure. Upstream Kubernetes does not except in the case of distributions supporting node autoscaling. Again, admins require to write policies specifying when nodes should be autoscaled unlike, automatically determined by Fargate.
Serverless Architecture: Fargate operates as a serverless model while Kubernetes uses a conventional distributed-server architecture.
Plugins: Kubernetes supports a large ecosystem of plugins and offers great customizability. Fargates offers limited customization.
Platform Dependencies: Fargate works only on specific AWS services while Kubernetes can run virtually anywhere.
Monitoring: Fargate can be easily monitored using a host of proprietary Amazon tools like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc. Kubernetes doesn’t ship with any default monitoring tool though a number of third-party tools can be leveraged to monitor.
AWS Fargate Vs. Kubernetes: How to choose?
When choosing between AWS Fargate Vs. Kubernetes, it seems Kubernetes isolatedly used, as in upstream Kubernetes has very few areas of use cases like:
- Extensive control over workload configuration is required.
- OS-level access to the infrastructure is required.
- Some third-party tool not supported by Fargate is being used.
- You need to manage workloads inside VMs.
On the other hand Fargate covers for:
- Relieving the developer team from writing codes for configuring Kubernetes networking resources, storage plugins, RBAC, and so on.
- High scalability and at a fast pace.
- Workloads are not subject to strict specific types of isolation compliances.
Fargates are by far the best container orchestration services when containerized workloads are relatively simple and straightforward.
