No, the cost of a Fargate vCPU is just higher compared to EC2. An EC2 t3.small instance costs about 2 cents/hour and a similar configuration on Fargate costs about 9 cents/hour. For m6i.large and c6i.large instances, the disparity isn't as bad but it's still 15%-20% more expensive.

There are a few different reasons we're using Fargate. Like the other commenter mentioned, there's the lambda max run time. Our Fargate tasks also have a few sidecar containers running alongside the main services. The ECS Exec integration is also nice for poking around when things aren't working correctly.

Of course it is, if it were cheaper then it would always win over EC2 for container workloads.

This is why I said it's a matter of usage - it's worth paying more per unit time if it's running less and more sporadically making it cheaper over all.

I don't disagree about usage, but a 300% upcharge over a burstable EC2 instance is not reasonable from a pricing perspective.

Fargate should allow users to specify their compute requirements beyond just vCPU count and GB memory.

> Lambda supports containers now (...)

The usecases for Fargate vs Lambda are not the same. For instance, Fargate is mainly intended for servers/long-running applications, whereas Lambdas have a hard runtime cap of 15min.

Why is that incompatible with it being a matter of usage, as I said?

Lambda makes sense when usage is a small fraction of the day; 'long-running applications' are not that.