Is AWS Fargate better than Amazon EKS managed node groups?

Question

Amazon EKS managed node groups automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of nodes (Amazon EC2 instances) for Amazon EKS Kubernetes clusters.

AWS Fargate is a technology that provides on-demand, right-sized compute capacity for containers. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale groups of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your node groups, or optimize cluster packing.

So, Is AWS Fargate better than Amazon EKS managed node groups? When should I choose managed node groups?

Answer 1

We chose to go with AWS Managed Node groups for the following reasons:

• Daemonsets are not supported in EKS Fargate, so observability tools like Splunk and Datadog have to run in sidecar containers in each pod instead of a daemonset per node
• In EKS Fargate each pod is run in its own VM and container images are not cached on nodes, making the startup times for pods 1-2 minutes long

Answer 2

There is no better than other. Your requirements (and skills) makes a product better than another!

The real difference in Fargate is that it's serverless, so you don't need for example to care about the EC2 instances right-sizing, you won't pay the idle time.

To go straight to the point: unless you are a K8S expert I would suggest Fargate.

Answer 3

All replies are on point. There isn't really "better" here. It's a trade-off. I am part of the container team at AWS and we recently wrote about the potential advantages of using Fargate over EC2. Faster pod start time, images caching, large pods configurations, special hw requirements e.g. GPUs) are all good reasons for needing to use EC2. We are working hard to make Fargate a better place to be though by filling some of the gaps so you could appreciate only the advantages.