AWS Fargate is a serverless, and pay-as-you-go compute engine. Serverless computing means a company utilizes backend services from a serverless vendor with charges based on usage, not a fixed amount of bandwidth or number of servers. Backend services can be of any type, data service, web service, Java service, security service, etc. AWS Fargate is compatible with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
With that in mind, AWS Fargate Spot offers cost-savings capability on AWS Fargate. It can run interruption-tolerant Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks at up to a 70% discount off the Fargate price. The concept is the same as using EC2 Spot Instance. Fargate Spot uses spare capacity in the AWS cloud to run tasks.
For example, when the capacity for Fargate Spot is available, tasks are launched based on a specified request. However, when AWS needs the capacity back, the tasks running on Fargate Spot will be interrupted after a two-minute notification. If the capacity for Fargate Spot stops being available, any running tasks are automatically scaled down, but any regular running tasks are maintained. Therefore, Fargate Spot is intended to be utilized with fault-tolerant workloads, which enables significant cost optimization. Tasks that cannot tolerate interruptions should not be run on AWS Fargate Spot.
Fargate Spot is great for workloads like image rendering, genomic processing, or risk variant simulations. Genomic processing is a laboratory method used to determine the entire genetic makeup of a specific organism or cell type. Tasks like those can afford the time to be interrupted.
Remember, any Spot Task is variable and may be interrupted when AWS needs the capacity back, but the cost savings are significant, ranging between 50% to 70% off the price of an On-Demand Task. So, when used in context, Fargate Spot brings real and immediate value benefits to your AWS budget.
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