Amazon AWS has recently launched ECS Fargate to “run containers without having to manage servers or clusters”.

So this got me interested enough to patch the Jenkins ECS plugin to run Jenkins agents as containers using Fargate model instead of the previous model where you would still need to create and manage VM instances to run the containers.

How does it work?

With the Jenkins ECS plugin you can configure a “Cloud” item that will launch all your agents on ECS Fargate, matching jobs to different container templates using labels. This means you can have unlimited agents with no machines to manage and just pay for what you use.

Some tips on the configuration:

• Some options need to be configured, like subnet, security group and assign a public ip to the container in order to launch in Fargate.
• Agents need to adhere to some predefined cpu and memory configurations. For instance for 1 vCPU you can only use 2GB to 8GB in 1GB increments.

Pricing

If you compare the price with a m5.large instance (4 vCPU, 16 GB) that costs $0.192 per hour, it would cost you $0,4056 in Fargate, more than twice, ouch! You could build something similar and cheaper with Kubernetes using the cluster autoscaler given you can achieve a high utilization of the machines.

While I was writing this post someone already beat me to submit a PR to the ECS plugin to add the Fargate support.