# Underuse of Fargate Spot for Interruptible Workloads

Canonical: https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/underuse-of-fargate-spot-for-interruptible-workloads

[Cloud Efficiency Hub](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) 

# Underuse of Fargate Spot for Interruptible Workloads

## Explanation

Many teams run workloads on standard Fargate pricing even when the workload is fault-tolerant and could tolerate interruptions. Fargate Spot provides the same performance characteristics at up to 70% lower cost, making it ideal for stateless jobs, batch processing, CI/CD runners, or retry-friendly microservices.

## Relevant Billing Model

Fargate is billed based on vCPU and memory usage per second. Standard Fargate pricing is significantly higher than Fargate Spot, which offers steep discounts for interruptible workloads.

## Detection

- Do not require continuous availability or persistent state

- Can tolerate retries or interruptions

- Are currently using standard pricing rather than Spot

- Run in non-production environments or are scheduled/batch in nature\\\\

- Have high "Fargate-vCPU-Hours" and "Fargate-GB-Hours" billed at on-demand rates

## Remediation

- Update ECS/EKS task definitions or profiles to enable Fargate Spot

- For mixed environments, use capacity providers or placement strategies to route eligible tasks to Spot

- Monitor interruption rates and implement retry logic where necessary

## Relevant Documentation

[AWS Fargate Spot - Official Docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/userguide/fargate-capacity-providers.html) 
[AWS Fargate Pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/)

[Submit Feedback](https://hub.pointfive.co/inefficiencies/underuse-of-fargate-spot-for-interruptible-workloads)

## At a glance

Reference

CER-0181

Cloud provider

AWS

Service

AWS Fargate

Category

[Compute](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/compute)

Inefficiency type

Pricing Model Misalignment

## Contributed by

- Andrew Shieh 

### Andrew Shieh

Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering, Operations @ SmugMug

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shandrew/)

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Source: the public page above. Product screenshots and illustrative interfaces are examples, not live customer data.