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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

That’s what Fargate is.

Sort of. Lambda is event-driven and on-demand, Fargate is "task-based". As mentioned in the sibling comment, if you build a "ping" HTTP endpoint in both, in Lambda you will have just a function which is called when necessary, in Fargate you will need to build a mini-webserver to keep listening for requests (as well as pay just to be listening instead of pay just when running).

I like how both you and the sibling comment tried to educate me on the difference between containers and event-driven compute. I'm well aware of the difference. My point, which maybe I didn't make so clear since both of you missed it, was that you can make fargate spin up a container for an event, but it would be too slow for any useful event driven computing.

If you're gonna use containers, use containers. If you want someone else to manage the container for you, use Lambda.

Fargate is a great service, but it's not a serverless solution not by any mainstream definition of the term (although Amazon seems to be intent on stretching the definition lately).

Create a simple ping/pong HTTP service in both and you'll quickly see difference in everything from billing to startup time.

If you're gonna use containers, use containers. If you want someone else to manage the container for you, use Lambda.

In one moment you're saying "Thats what Fargate is" as if Fargate == Running Serverless Containers.

On the other you're saying "you can make fargate spin up a container for an event, but it would be too slow for any useful event driven computing", which is the truth, but it contradicts your initial comment.

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