Unless I misread the article, but the writer makes a claim of having to support 100 req/sec with about 50 instances. "For Fargate, this meant deploying 50 instances of my container with pretty beefy settings — 8 GB of memory and 4 full CPU units per container instance.". If the api service was just returning some data with a few manupilations, then that is quite inefficient. At NodeChef ( https://www.nodechef.com ), there are users running over 1000 req/sec with just around 12 containers each with 512 MB ram and 2 CPUs.