AWS ECS vs EKS vs Fargate — when would you choose each?

Question

"10 microservices. ECS, EKS, or Fargate?"

Interview OS Community · Accepted Answer

| Service | What | Complexity |
|---------|------|------------|
| ECS | AWS-native container orchestrator | Medium |
| EKS | Managed Kubernetes | High |
| Fargate | Serverless containers (no server management) | Low |

```
Already using K8s? → EKS
AWS-only, want simplicity? → ECS + Fargate
Don't want to manage servers? → Fargate
Multi-cloud? → EKS (portable)
```

Fargate works with both ECS and EKS. Pay per vCPU-second. For cost-sensitive high traffic, use ECS/EC2 with reserved instances.

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AWS ECS vs EKS vs Fargate — when would you choose each?

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Service	What	Complexity
ECS	AWS-native container orchestrator	Medium
EKS	Managed Kubernetes	High
Fargate	Serverless containers (no server management)	Low