AWS Fargate vs Azure Service Fabric: What are the differences?

Key differences between AWS Fargate and Azure Service Fabric

1. 1. Deployment model: AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers, where users only need to provide the containerized application without worrying about infrastructure management. On the other hand, Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage microservices-based applications. It provides more control over the underlying infrastructure, allowing users to choose between deploying containers or virtual machines.

2. 2. Container orchestration: AWS Fargate leverages Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for container orchestration. It automatically manages tasks, including scaling and load balancing. In comparison, Azure Service Fabric has its own built-in container orchestration capabilities, allowing users to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications without requiring external tools or services.

3. 3. Service discovery: AWS Fargate relies on Amazon Route 53 or third-party service discovery tools for service discovery within a VPC. Alternatively, Azure Service Fabric offers built-in service discovery and naming resolution, simplifying the process of locating and communicating with services within the cluster.

4. 4. Programming models: Azure Service Fabric provides a choice of programming models for building microservices, including Reliable Services and Reliable Actors. These programming models offer features like state management, actor-based concurrency, and reliable messaging. AWS Fargate, being primarily a compute engine, does not provide similar built-in programming models specifically tailored for microservices development.

5. 5. Platform maturity: AWS Fargate has been available since 2017 and has seen significant adoption and growth in the container ecosystem. Azure Service Fabric, on the other hand, has been available since 2015 and has been used by large-scale enterprise applications, demonstrating its maturity and robustness in deploying and managing complex distributed systems.

6. 6. Pricing model: AWS Fargate pricing is based on per-second consumption of CPU and memory resources, allowing users to optimize costs based on actual usage. Azure Service Fabric pricing is based on virtual machine instances and storage, making it suitable for applications with predictable resource requirements.

In summary, AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine that simplifies container deployment and management, while Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that offers more control and flexibility in building and scaling microservices-based applications.