Amazon ECS launch types

You can specify an Amazon ECS launch type when you run a standalone task or create a service. Doing so determines the infrastructure that your tasks and services are hosted on. The following are the available launch types.

Fargate launch type

You can use the Fargate launch type to run your containerized applications without the need of provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. AWS Fargate is the serverless way to host your Amazon ECS workloads.

For information about the Regions that support Fargate, see Supported Regions for Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

The following diagram shows the general architecture.

For more information about Amazon ECS on Fargate, see Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

EC2 launch type

You can use the EC2 launch type to run your containerized applications on Amazon EC2 instances that you register to your Amazon ECS cluster and manage yourself.

The following diagram shows the general architecture.

External launch type

The External launch type is used to run your containerized applications on your on-premise server or virtual machine (VM) that you register to your Amazon ECS cluster and manage remotely. For more information, see External instances (Amazon ECS Anywhere).