AWS Introduces Discounted Fargate Spot Pricing and Capacity Providers
AWS brings affordable spot capacity to its serverless Fargate container platform, offering steep discounts for interruptible workloads. The company also introduces capacity providers to automate how applications mix on-demand and spot instances.
AWS quietly launches spot capacity for Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both ECS and EKS. Similar to traditional EC2 spot instances, Fargate Spot offers significantly cheaper pricing for both storage and compute in exchange for the possibility of sudden termination when AWS needs the capacity back. This new pricing tier costs just over a penny per CPU hour compared to roughly four cents for standard on-demand instances.
Alongside this discounted pricing, AWS introduces a feature called capacity providers that automates how users provision compute resources. Developers write a simple configuration file to define their desired mix of on-demand and spot instances across Fargate and EC2. The scheduler then actively maintains this ratio, automatically falling back to on-demand capacity when spot instances are unavailable and returning to spot instances when they become accessible again.
These updates give developers granular control over their cloud infrastructure costs without manually managing instance types. AWS executives note that containers already account for a large portion of spot usage on the platform, making this a natural evolution for Fargate. In the future, this capacity provider system will even allow users to blend EC2, Fargate, and on-premises AWS Outposts into a single automated scheduling workflow.