Underuse of Fargate Spot for Interruptible Workloads

Andrew Shieh

Service Category

Compute

Cloud Provider

AWS

Service Name

AWS Fargate

Inefficiency Type

Pricing Model Misalignment

Explanation

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.

Relevant Billing Model

Fargate is billed based on vCPU and memory usage per second. Standard Fargate pricing is significantly higher than Fargate Spot, which offers steep discounts for interruptible workloads.

Detection

Do not require continuous availability or persistent state
Can tolerate retries or interruptions
Are currently using standard pricing rather than Spot
Run in non-production environments or are scheduled/batch in nature\\
Have high “Fargate-vCPU-Hours” and “Fargate-GB-Hours” billed at on-demand rates

Remediation

Update ECS/EKS task definitions or profiles to enable Fargate Spot
For mixed environments, use capacity providers or placement strategies to route eligible tasks to Spot
Monitor interruption rates and implement retry logic where necessary

Relevant Documentation

AWS Fargate Spot – Official Docs
AWS Fargate Pricing

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