> CONTAINERIZED
Managed Container Microservices on AWS ECS Fargate
Serverless container execution on AWS ECS Fargate eliminating EC2 cluster management overhead while providing predictable per-second resource billing.
Mathematical Breakeven Inflection Curve
Cost-optimal for workloads with 10 - 80 tasks. Above 100 steady-state tasks, EKS with Karpenter and Spot instances reduces cost by 45%.
3 Maturity Tiers & Infrastructure Specifications
Component stack and cost steps from prototype to hyper-scale enterprise
1. Prototype / Early Stage2 - 6 container tasks
$85 - $260 / mo
$0.042 / task-hour
Stack Components:
- AWS Application Load Balancer
- ECS Fargate (0.5 vCPU, 1GB RAM)
- RDS PostgreSQL (db.t4g.micro)
Cost Allocation:ECS Service Tags (service=core)
Autoscaling:ECS Target Tracking (CPU 70%)
2. Scaled Production10 - 50 container tasks
$450 - $2,200 / mo
$0.034 / task-hour (Fargate Savings Plans)
Stack Components:
- ALB with WAF
- ECS Fargate on ARM64 Graviton
- RDS Aurora PostgreSQL (Multi-AZ)
Cost Allocation:Fargate Cost Allocation Tags + Compute Savings Plans
Autoscaling:ECS Step Scaling with CloudWatch Alarms
3. High-Throughput Enterprise50 - 250 container tasks
$2,200 - $9,500 / mo
$0.028 / task-hour (Fargate Spot blend)
Stack Components:
- Network Load Balancer (NLB)
- ECS Fargate Spot (70% Spot / 30% On-Demand)
- Aurora Serverless v2 Read Replicas
Cost Allocation:Granular Service-Level Cost Allocation
Autoscaling:KEDA on ECS or Custom Metric Autoscaler
Key Cost Drivers
- •Fargate vCPU-hour ($0.04048)
- •Fargate GB-hour ($0.004445)
- •Application Load Balancer LCU fees
Waste Vulnerabilities
- •WST-CMP-04: Running x86 instead of ARM64 Fargate
- •Allocating 4x more memory than P99 container consumption
Mitigation Playbooks
- •Shift to Fargate Graviton (20% instant savings)
- •Purchase 1-Year Compute Savings Plans (28% savings)
- •Fargate Spot for batch and worker tiers