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Former AWS engineer says Fargate runs on EC2 instances, not Firecracker microVMs
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An engineer who worked on AWS EKS from 2020 through 2024 writes that Fargate does not use Firecracker to create microVMs for each container, despite AWS marketing and documentation allowing customers to believe that it does.
If Fargate uses per-customer EC2 instances rather than Firecracker microVMs, it does not provide hardware isolation between your own containers, does not eliminate noisy neighbor problems, and shifts operational burden rather than removing it. Engineers evaluating Fargate should weigh those limitations against the premium cost over EC2.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
AWS documentation and blog posts imply Fargate uses Firecracker, but a former EKS team member says it uses per-customer EC2 instances instead.
Fargate does not provide hardware isolation between a customer's own containers or eliminate noisy neighbor problems, only isolation between customers.
Operational burden shifts to workarounds for EBS volumes, GPUs, and sidecar daemons, and Fargate costs significantly more than EC2.
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