Can You Run AWS Fargate On-Premises or in the Hybrid Cloud?
Introduction
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for running containers in the Amazon Web Services public cloud. Given the popularity of AWS Fargate, it’s no surprise that many customers want to know if you can run AWS Fargate on-premises or in the hybrid cloud.
The short answer to that question is: “No, and/or it’s complicated.” Read on to learn more about your deployment options for AWS Fargate.
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Table of Contents
- Can You Run AWS Fargate On-Premises?
- Can You Run AWS Fargate in the Hybrid Cloud?
- AWS Fargate Alternatives: Iron.io
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Can You Run AWS Fargate On-Premises?
Simply put, it’s not possible to run AWS Fargate on-premises as of writing. AWS Fargate is intended to be used in conjunction with a container orchestration service such as Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) or Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). While both ECS and EKS have an on-premises option (see below), AWS Fargate currently isn’t compatible with an on-premises deployment.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that serverless on-premises computing is an impossibility—it just likely means that AWS Fargate isn’t the right choice for your situation. As we’ll discuss later in this piece, there are AWS Fargate alternatives if you want to do serverless computing on-premises.
Before we move on, let’s briefly mention how you can use ECS and EKS on-premises. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that brings AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to a data center or on-premises facility. Outposts are ideal for organizations that want to make use of Amazon Web Services, but that need to run containers on-premises. This may be for several reasons: e.g. data security and privacy regulations that require you to store and process data on-premises, or the need for extremely low latency with on-premises systems.
For most users, however, AWS Outposts is only worth it if you have a lot of data to process, and if a large portion of your workflow needs to run on-premises. The cost of AWS Outposts can be quite expensive, starting at a $225,000 payment for a 3-year term (or $6,965 every month with no upfront payment). AWS Outposts also runs only on AWS-designed hardware, which means that you can’t reuse your existing on-premises servers.
In addition, AWS Outposts is not a serverless technology. It’s possible that in the future Outposts will include support for Amazon’s AWS Lambda serverless compute engine, but any comments at this point would be pure speculation. This means that as of writing, there’s no good way to do serverless computing on-premises with AWS.
Can You Run AWS Fargate in the Hybrid Cloud?
Hybrid cloud setups take advantage of both the public cloud and on-premises, mixing and matching both options to best fit the organization’s needs. Unfortunately, because it’s impossible to run AWS Fargate on-premises, it’s equally impossible to run AWS Fargate in the hybrid cloud, which depends on both the cloud and on-premises.
Of course, as already mentioned, you can combine Amazon ECS or EKS together with AWS Outposts to have a hybrid container orchestration system both in the cloud and on-premises—but you still wouldn’t have access to the serverless compute functionality that AWS Fargate gives you.
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AWS Fargate Alternatives: Iron.io
The reason that you can’t run AWS Fargate on-premises or in a hybrid deployment is simple: Amazon Web Services is a public cloud computing platform, which means that they want to incentivize users to move as much of their compute and storage to the cloud as possible. However, given this limitation, it’s understandable that many organizations would look for an AWS Fargate alternative.
IronWorker is a serverless, cloud-agnostic solution for background job processing that has a wide variety of deployment options: in the public cloud, on-premises, on a dedicated server, or using a hybrid model that combines the cloud and on-premises. By letting users select the deployment option that works best for their IT environment, IronWorker gives you much more flexibility and helps you avoid vendor lock-in, which is a real possibility with platforms such as AWS.
Thanks in no small part to this flexibility, IronWorker has received an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on the business software review website G2. One reviewer writes:
The IronWorker on-premise solution is perfect for our needs. Where compliance and security is paramount, the on-premise install is key. If we ever need assistance, their support team has always been there and got us on track very quickly… We have a new project requiring us to scale fast, and Iron really helps us do that very efficiently.
Of course, the ability to do serverless computing on-premises and in the hybrid cloud is just one of IronWorker’s many benefits. IronWorker also has a gentle learning curve, thanks to extensive documentation that includes training videos and code samples, and excellent support for customers of all sizes and industries. IronWorker helps power some of the world’s most visited websites, including HotelTonight, Bleacher Report, and Untappd.
Looking for a serverless compute solution that can run on-premises, in the cloud, or using a hybrid setup? Whatever your needs, IronWorker can help. Schedule a chat today to start your free 14-day trial of IronWorker.
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Thanks for an interesting article. However, maybe this need to be updated since you do not cover ECS/EKS Anywhere and the open source of EKS? Another interesting aspect is that the Outpost is not only for the “central” on-premises datacenter, but also maybe more and more for the edge located on-premises datacenters, and especially in the case of AWS Wavelength. I think that these edge cases will drive AWS to make some kind of support for Firecracker (the “serverless framework” used for both AWS Lambda and Fargate) for these situations, and if existing on the Outpost for edge cases they will of course also work for the cases of a centralized on-premises datacenter solution.
Another aspects that are of most importance is if and how you can use other AWS services in combination, for example CloudWatch and X-Ray for management/observability. You have this in AWS Regions and Outposts, but will this somehow be included in the ECS/EKS Anywhere on-premises solution?