We're running aws ecs fargate vs eks - cost analysis for production workloads in production and wanted to share our experience.
Scale:
- 531 services deployed
- 35 TB data processed/month
- 35M requests/day
- 3 regions worldwide
Architecture:
- Compute: App Runner
- Data: RDS Aurora
- Queue: MSK (Kafka)
Monthly cost: ~$121k
Lessons learned:
1. Spot instances are production-ready
2. NAT Gateways are costly
3. Autoscaling needs careful tuning
AMA about our setup!
Great point! We've seen similar results in our environment.
The migration path we took:
Week 1-2: Research & POC
Week 3-4: Staging deployment
Week 5-6: Prod rollout (10% -> 50% -> 100%)
Week 7-8: Optimization
Total cost: ~200 eng hours
Would do it again in a heartbeat.
We benchmarked 5 solutions:
1. Option A: fast but expensive
2. Option B: cheap but limited
3. Option C: goldilocks zone ✓
Ended up with C, saved 40% vs A.
We evaluated this last year. The main challenge was...
We evaluated Docker last quarter and decided against it due to licensing costs. Instead, we went with Jenkins which better fit our use case. The main factors were cost (30% cheaper), ease of use (2-day vs 2-week training), and community support.