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What's the Difference Between Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate?

Compare Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon EC2
AWS Fargate
Category

Compute, Virtual Machines

Containers, Serverless Containers
Description

Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload

Serverless compute for containers. Run containers without managing servers or clusters.
Best for
  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers
  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration
Key features
  • Auto Scaling
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • GPU instances
  • Bare metal instances
  • Nitro System
  • No server management
  • Isolation by design
  • ECS & EKS compatible
  • Spot capacity
  • ARM support
Pricing model

On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans

Pay for vCPU and memory per second
Free tier

Yes

No
Expert take

“EC2 gives you full control over the compute environment with 750+ instance types. For workloads that need sustained CPU, GPU acceleration, or specific OS configurations, EC2 remains the most flexible option on AWS.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Fargate removes the need to manage EC2 instances for your containers. Choose it when you want per-task isolation without worrying about patching hosts, right-sizing nodes, or bin-packing. You pay per-second for only the vCPU and memory each task uses.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon EC2 »

Learn more about AWS Fargate »

When to use Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate

Use Amazon EC2 when:

  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers

Learn more about Amazon EC2 »

Use AWS Fargate when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch processing
  • ML inference
  • Application migration

Learn more about AWS Fargate »

AWS product comparisons

Read about AWS products side-by-side

Displaying 1-8 (21)
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What's the difference between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Neptune?

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What's the difference between Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB?

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What's the difference between Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS?

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