AWS Fargate supports both x86 and Graviton2 (ARM64) CPU architectures, but by default, many workloads continue to run on x86. Graviton2 delivers significantly better price-performance, especially for stateless, scale-out container workloads. Teams that fail to configure task definitions with the `ARM64` architecture miss out on meaningful efficiency gains. Because this setting is not enabled automatically and is often overlooked, it results in higher compute costs for functionally equivalent workloads.
Many teams run workloads on standard Fargate pricing even when the workload is fault-tolerant and could tolerate interruptions. Fargate Spot provides the same performance characteristics at up to 70% lower cost, making it ideal for stateless jobs, batch processing, CI/CD runners, or retry-friendly microservices.