> That means keeping unused or partially used EC2s up which means $$$.
It does but having a pre-sized cluster that's overprovisioned can end up being cheaper than using Fargate because Fargate is really expensive. This isn't accounting for using spot instances on EC2 too.
Of course your mileage may vary but as long as you're not dealing with massively irregular spikes where you're spinning up hundreds or thousands of containers up / down based on load you can very easily just run a few [dozen] replicas of your apps on a pre-sized cluster with enough room to let Kubernetes horizontally scale your pods as needed.
For scaling the cluster's size there's Karpenter which is mentioned in the post. It can quite quickly give you new resources in a Fargate-like manner without needing to use Fargate. The benefit of Karpenter is it's faster than auto-scaling groups and you can spin up uniquely sized instances based on your workload.
It does but having a pre-sized cluster that's overprovisioned can end up being cheaper than using Fargate because Fargate is really expensive. This isn't accounting for using spot instances on EC2 too.
Of course your mileage may vary but as long as you're not dealing with massively irregular spikes where you're spinning up hundreds or thousands of containers up / down based on load you can very easily just run a few [dozen] replicas of your apps on a pre-sized cluster with enough room to let Kubernetes horizontally scale your pods as needed.
For scaling the cluster's size there's Karpenter which is mentioned in the post. It can quite quickly give you new resources in a Fargate-like manner without needing to use Fargate. The benefit of Karpenter is it's faster than auto-scaling groups and you can spin up uniquely sized instances based on your workload.