A developer built an application that calls an external API to obtain data, processes the...

To run a containerized job hourly in ECS with minimal infrastructure management, the best choice is AWS Fargate. Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that runs ECS tasks without the developer needing to provision, patch, or scale EC2 instances.

With option C, the developer defines an ECS task definition using the Fargate launch type and schedules it (commonly via Amazon EventBridge Scheduler / EventBridge rule triggering RunTask). ECS handles the placement, networking, and execution of the task on managed infrastructure. This is the least operational overhead approach because there are no instances to manage and no capacity planning required, which fits an hourly job with small CPU/RAM needs.

Option A (capacity providers) is primarily for managing EC2 capacity for ECS and still requires underlying instances, which increases operational burden.

Option B runs the app on an EC2 instance, which requires instance lifecycle management, OS patching, scaling considerations, and failure handling.

Option D refers to managed node groups (an EKS concept) and does not apply cleanly to ECS. Even in a Kubernetes context, nodes still need management compared to Fargate.

Therefore, defining a Fargate task is the simplest and lowest-management solution.