EKS Fargate vs Managed Nodes: Decision

Fargate eliminates node management; managed nodes give more control. The trade-offs.

Fargate

No nodes to manage. Per-pod billing.

Best for: small teams, bursty workloads, dev environments.

Managed nodes

Standard node groups. More control: instance types, kubelet config, daemonsets.

Best for: production at scale, specific resource needs.

Hybrid

Fargate for dev/staging; nodes for production.

Or: nodes for app workloads; Fargate for batch jobs.