Choosing AWS Compute: EC2, Lambda, Fargate, or EKS

Let’s face it—choosing the right AWS compute service isn’t easy. There’s EC2, Lambda, Fargate, EKS... and each one sounds like it solves a specific problem. But when you’re a CTO, a DevOps lead, or a founder at a growing startup, you’re not just picking tech—you’re picking a long-term strategy. What you choose today could either slow you down or give your team a real advantage.

We’ve been down this road ourselves. After building platforms for fast-moving teams and optimizing costs across different setups, we realized that most people don’t want to think in infrastructure—they want to ship. That’s why we’re sharing how we think about AWS compute, where each option fits, and why we ended up building our own version of EKS that feels like Lambda but scales like EC2—delivering the kind of DevOps as a Service experience that helps teams stay fast without getting buried in complexity.

"AWS doesn’t give you one compute solution — it gives you a spectrum. Your job is to map the right one to your growth stage and team maturity."

EC2 is AWS in its rawest form. It gives you full OS access, custom networking, specialized hardware—you name it. And it’s still relevant today.

• You’re dealing with legacy systems or self-hosted software

• You need GPU, high-memory, or ARM-based instances

• You want full control over your runtime and scaling behavior

• You’re managing everything—patching, autoscaling, monitoring

• Provisioning and scaling take effort and time

• Not built for teams that want quick iteration

EC2 is great when you know what you're doing and want to squeeze every bit of performance — but expect to pay the ops tax unless you've got a strong AWS cost optimization strategy in place.

Lambda is the poster child for serverless. You upload your function, set the trigger, and forget about infrastructure.

• Low-traffic, event-driven workloads (e.g., image processing, cron jobs)

• Fast prototyping or MVPs

• Teams who don’t want to touch infrastructure at all

• Cold starts are real

• You’re bound to AWS-specific limits (memory, runtime, execution model)

• Debugging and monitoring get harder as complexity grows

If you’re spending more than $100/month or building something more than glue code, Lambda starts becoming a bottleneck.

Lambda is perfect—until you need to debug a cold start, or explain why your costs spiked last month.

Fargate abstracts away the underlying servers, so you can deploy containers without managing EC2 or Kubernetes nodes.

• You want container benefits without running Kubernetes

• You’re building small, independent microservices

• Your team doesn’t have infra experience

• No support for spot instances

• Higher per-unit cost than EC2

• Slower to start containers

• Limited runtime control

Fargate is great if your team wants to move fast and stay small—but the cost can sneak up on you.

EKS gives you a managed Kubernetes control plane, which is great. But that’s just the control plane. You still need to manage worker nodes, configure autoscaling, handle observability, and secure everything.

• You already run Kubernetes

• You want full flexibility and portability

• You have or are building a platform team

• When teams need to ship but are stuck learning K8s internals

• When infra becomes the bottleneck to developer productivity

EKS is powerful, but raw. It’s not something you hand over to every dev team unless you’ve wrapped it in a safer, simpler DevOps platform as a service layer that streamlines complexity and accelerates delivery.

We’ve built our own abstraction on top of EKS. Think of it like this: the developer experience of Lambda or Fargate, with the flexibility and cost control of EC2 and Kubernetes. We call it “the last compute platform you’ll need.”

• Simplified YAML configs that look like Lambda deployment specs

• Spot-aware autoscaling built in

• Git-based CI/CD built into the workflow

• Observability and security defaults out of the box

• Developers don’t have to know Kubernetes

• We control costs with spot-heavy clusters

• We maintain full flexibility over runtimes, networking, and tooling

• It’s portable—no AWS lock-in

Our EKS setup gives us serverless DX with EC2-level flexibility and cost. It’s the only setup that scales both tech and teams.

Let’s be real: most teams don’t want to think about infrastructure. They want to deploy code and get on with it. Here’s how we break it down:

• Your traffic is low (under $100/month)

• You need to move fast for a small script or prototype

• You expect growth

• You want to reduce infra complexity without losing control

• You care about observability, scaling, and cost

• Lambda is cheap when it’s small. Gets expensive fast.

• Fargate is the most expensive on a per-unit basis.

• Vanilla EKS can be cheap but requires serious tuning.

• Our EKS platform is cheap and tuned by default.

• EC2 is the cheapest per unit, but costly in time.

If you want control + scale + simplicity, our EKS setup wins.

You don’t need to guess which compute option to use. The real decision is: how much complexity are you willing to manage, and how fast do you want to move—because getting it wrong could mean missing out on serious AWS compute optimizer cost savings.

For 99% of real-world use cases, our EKS platform gives the right balance. It’s fast to onboard, efficient at scale, and fully customizable. Unless you’re just gluing together events for a prototype, there’s no good reason to go Lambda or Fargate when you can get all the benefits—without the vendor lock-in or pricing surprises.

If your platform doesn’t help your team move faster and scale cheaper, it’s not worth it.