Amazon Elastic Container Service | Using Amazon ECS

Question 1

How is Amazon ECS different from AWS Lambda?

Using Amazon ECS

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Answer 1

Amazon ECS is a highly scalable Docker container management service that allows you to run and manage distributed applications that run in Docker containers. AWS Lambda is an event-driven task compute service that runs your code in response to “events” such as changes in data, website clicks, or messages from other AWS services without you having to manage any compute infrastructure.

Question 2

How do I get started using Amazon ECS?

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Answer 2

Visit our Getting Started page for more information on how to start using ECS.

Question 3

Does Amazon ECS support any other container types?

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Answer 3

No. Docker is the only container platform supported by Amazon ECS at this time.

Question 4

I want to launch containers. Why do I have to launch Tasks?

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Answer 4

Docker encourages you to split your applications up into their individual components, and Elastic Container Service is optimized for this pattern. Tasks allow you to define a set of containers that you would like to be placed together (or part of the same placement decision), their properties, and how they may be linked. Tasks include all the information that Amazon ECS needs to make the placement decision. To launch a single container, your Task Definition should only include one container definition.

Question 5

Does Amazon ECS support applications and services?

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Answer 5

Yes. The Amazon ECS Service scheduler can manage long-running applications and services. The Service scheduler helps you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your containers up or down to meet your application’s capacity requirements. The Service scheduler allows you to distribute traffic across your containers using Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon ECS will automatically register and deregister your containers from the associated load balancer.

The Service scheduler will also automatically recover containers that become unhealthy (fail ELB health checks) or stop running to ensure you have the desired number of healthy containers supporting your application.

You can scale your application up and down by changing the number of containers you want the service to run. You can update your application by changing its definition or using a new image. The scheduler will automatically start new containers using the new definition and stop containers running the previous version (waiting for the ELB connections to drain if ELB is used).

Question 6

Does Amazon ECS support dynamic port mapping?

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Answer 6

Yes. It is possible to associate a service on Amazon ECS to an Application Load Balancer (ALB) for the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service. The ALB supports a target group that contains a set of instance ports. You can specify a dynamic port in the ECS task definition which gives the container an unused port when it is scheduled on the EC2 instance. The ECS scheduler will automatically add the task to the Application Load Balancer’s target group using this port.

Question 7

Does Amazon ECS support batch jobs?

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Answer 7

Yes. You can use Amazon ECS Run task to run one or more tasks once. Run task starts the task on an instance that meets the task’s requirements including CPU, memory and ports.

Question 8

Can I use my own scheduler with Amazon ECS?

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Answer 8

ECS provides Blox, a collection of open source projects for container management and orchestration. Blox makes it easy to consume events from Amazon ECS, store the cluster state locally and query the local data store through APIs. Blox also includes a daemon scheduler that can be used as a reference for how to use the cluster state server. See the Blox GitHub page to learn more.

Question 9

Can I use my own AMI?

Using Amazon ECS

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Answer 9

Yes. You can use any AMI that meets the Amazon ECS AMI specification. We recommend starting from the Amazon ECS-enabled Amazon Linux AMI. Partner AMIs compatible with Amazon ECS are also available. You can review the Amazon ECS AMI specification in the documentation.

Question 10

How can I configure my container instances to pull from Amazon Elastic Container Registry?

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Answer 10

Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon ECS allowing you to easily store, run, and manage container images for applications running on Amazon ECS. All you need to do is specify the Amazon ECR repository in your Task Definition and attach the AmazonEC2ContainerServiceforEC2Role to your instances. Then Amazon ECS will retrieve the appropriate images for your applications.

Question 11

How does AWS Fargate work with Amazon ECS?

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Answer 11

With Fargate, the concept of server provisioning, cluster management, and orchestration completely goes away. Amazon ECS uses containers provisioned by Fargate to automatically scale, load balance, and manage scheduling of your containers for availability, providing an easier way to build and operate containerized applications.