How do vCPU-based quotas benefit me?

Amazon EC2 instances support multithreading, which enables multiple threads to run concurrently on a single CPU core. Each thread is represented as a virtual CPU (vCPU) on the instance. An instance has a default number of CPU cores, which varies according to instance type. For example, an m5.xlarge instance type has two CPU cores and two threads per core by default—four vCPUs in total.

Each vCPU is a thread of a CPU core, except for T2 instances and instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors.

Prior to the vCPU-based quota change [1], the CPU units hard limit for Fargate tasks was 4096 (see documentation archive from June/July: [3]); since then we have added support for higher CPU units for Fargate tasks, given that the new vCPU limit is enabled. The new supported CPU values are 8192 (8 vCPU) and 16384 (16 vCPU), as noted in our current documentation [4a][4b].

The vCPU-based quotas will allow you to launch at least the same number of task or pods as you do today with task and pod count-based quotas. Your new vCPU-based quotas can be viewed on the Service Quotas console. The migration to vCPU quotas will not have any impact on your running tasks and pods.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/migrating-fargate-service-quotas-to-vcpu-based-quotas/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/faqs/#Fargate_vCPU-based_Service_Quotas

[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20220627082836/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/task_definition_parameters.html

[4a] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/09/aws-fargate-increases-compute-memory-resource-configurations-4x/

[4b] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/task_definition_parameters.html#task_size

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ecs-account-settings.html#fargate-quotas