Amazon Elastic Container Service Features

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) allows you to easily deploy containerized workloads on Amazon Web Services. The powerful simplicity of Amazon ECS enables you to grow from a single Docker container to managing your entire enterprise application portfolio. Run and scale your container workloads across availability zones, in the cloud, and on-premises, without the complexity of managing a control plane or nodes.

• Serverless by default with Amazon Fargate: Amazon Fargate is built-in to Amazon ECS, which means you no longer have to worry about managing servers, handling capacity planning, or figuring out how to isolate container workloads for security. Just define your application’s requirements, select Fargate as your launch type in the console or CLI, and Fargate takes care of all the scaling and infrastructure management required to run your containers.
• Amazon ECS Anywhere: With ECS Anywhere, you can use the same familiar Amazon ECS console and operator tools to manage your on-premises container workloads for a consistent experience across your container-based applications. The Amazon Systems Manager integration automatically and securely establishes trust between your on-premises hardware and the Amazon Web Services control plane.
• Security and isolation by design: Amazon ECS natively integrates with the Security, Identity, and Management and Governance tools you already trust, which helps you get to production quickly and successfully. You can assign granular permissions for each of your containers, giving you a high level of isolation when building your applications. Launch your containers with the security and compliance levels you’ve come to expect from Amazon Web Services.
• Autonomous control plane operations: Amazon ECS is a fully-managed container orchestration service, with Amazon Web Services configuration and operational best practices built-in, and no control plane, nodes, or add-ons for you to manage. It natively integrates with both Amazon Web Services and third-party tools to make it easier for teams to focus on building the applications, not the environment.

Docker Support

Amazon ECS supports Docker and enables you to run and manage Docker containers. It even integrates into the Docker Compose CLI, so you can define and run multi-container applications. Applications you package as a container locally will deploy and run on Amazon ECS without the need for any configuration changes.

Windows Containers Compatibility

Amazon ECS supports management of Windows containers. An Amazon ECS-optimized Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides enhanced instance and container launch time performance and visibility into CPU, memory utilization, and reservation metrics.

Repository Support

Amazon ECS can be used with any third-party hosted Docker image repository or accessible private Docker registry, such as Docker Hub and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). All you need to do is specify the repository in your task definition and Amazon ECS retrieves the appropriate images for your applications.

Task Definitions

Amazon ECS allows you to define tasks through a declarative JSON template called a Task Definition. Within a Task Definition you can specify one or more containers that are required for your task, including the Docker repository and image, memory and CPU requirements, shared data volumes, and how the containers are linked to each other. You can launch as many tasks as you want from a single Task Definition file that you can register with the service. Task Definition files also allow you to have version control over your application specification.

Programmatic Control

Amazon ECS provides you with a set of simple API actions to allow you to integrate and extend the service. The API actions allow you to create and delete clusters, register and deregister tasks, launch and terminate Docker containers, and provide detailed information about the state of your cluster and its instances. You can also use Amazon CloudFormation to provision Amazon ECS clusters, register task definitions, and schedule containers.

Container Deployments

Amazon ECS allows you to easily update your containers to new versions. You can upload a new version of your application task definition, and the Amazon ECS scheduler automatically starts new containers using the updated image and stop containers running the previous version. Amazon ECS automatically registers and deregisters your containers from the associated Application Load Balancer.

Blue/Green Deployments

Blue/green deployments with Amazon CodeDeploy help you minimize downtime during application updates. You can launch a new version of your Amazon ECS service alongside the old version and test the new version before you reroute traffic. You can also monitor the deployment process and rapidly rollback if there is an issue.

Container Auto-Recovery

Amazon ECS will automatically recover unhealthy containers to ensure that you have the desired number of containers supporting your application.

Capacity Providers

Capacity Providers allow you to define flexible rules for how containerized workloads run on different types of compute capacity, and manage the scaling of the capacity. Capacity Providers work with both Amazon EC2 and Amazon Fargate. When running tasks and services, you can split them across multiple Capacity Providers, enabling new capabilities such as running a service in a predefined split percentage.

Storage

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic file system, enabling you to build modern applications, and persist and share data and state, from your Amazon ECS and Amazon Fargate deployments. All aspects of using Amazon EFS with containers, including connectivity, is taken care of, zero management required. You can simply focus on your applications, not infrastructure.

Amazon ECS includes multiple scheduling strategies that place containers across your clusters based on your resource needs (for example, CPU or RAM) and availability requirements. Using the available scheduling strategies, you can schedule batch jobs, long-running applications and services, and daemon processes.

Task Scheduling

Amazon ECS task scheduling allows you to run processes that perform work and then stop, such as batch processing jobs. Task scheduling can start tasks manually, automatically from a queue of jobs, or based on a time interval that you define.

Service Scheduling

Amazon ECS service scheduling allows you to run stateless services and applications. This scheduling strategy ensures that a specified number of tasks are constantly running and restarts tasks if they fail. You can make sure that tasks are registered against an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer and can perform health checks that you define for your running tasks.

Daemon Scheduling

Amazon ECS daemon scheduling automatically runs the same task on each selected instance in your ECS cluster. This makes it easy to run tasks that provide common management functionality for a service like logging, monitoring, or backups.

Task Placement

Amazon ECS allows you to customize how tasks are placed onto a cluster of EC2 instances based on built-in attributes such as instance type, Availability Zone, or custom attributes that you define. You can use attributes such as environment = production to label resources, use the list API actions to find those resources, and use the RunTask and CreateService API actions to schedule tasks on those resources.

With Amazon ECS, you can also use placement strategies such as bin pack and spread to further define where tasks are placed. Policies can be chained together to achieve sophisticated placement capabilities without writing any code.

ECS Service Connect

Amazon ECS Service Connect simplifies service discovery, connectivity, and traffic observability for Amazon ECS. It helps you build applications faster by letting you focus on the application code and not on your networking infrastructure. You can use ECS Service Connect to define logical names for your service endpoints and use them in your client applications to connect to dependencies. ECS Service Connect helps send your traffic to healthy endpoints and provides rich traffic telemetry in the ECS console and in Amazon CloudWatch. Native ECS deployments are more robust with ECS Service Connect, as it supports automatic connection draining that helps your client applications switch to a new version of the service endpoint without encountering traffic errors.

With ECS Service Connect, you can:

Set the way client applications connect to their dependencies in just one step

Write and operate resilient distributed applications with logical naming

Monitor and distribute traffic between ECS tasks without deploying and configuring load balancers

Deploy services faster and deliver seamless integration of ECS microservices comprising an application

Service Discovery

Amazon ECS is integrated with Amazon Cloud Map to make it easy for your containerized services to discover and connect with each other. Amazon Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that lets you define custom names for your application resources. It increases your application availability because your web service will always discover the most up-to-date locations of these dynamically changing resources.

Task Networking

Amazon ECS supports Docker networking and integrates with Amazon VPC to provide isolation for containers. This gives you control over how containers connect with other services and external traffic. With Amazon ECS, you can choose between four networking modes for your containers that cater towards different use cases:

Task Networking/amazonvpc
This mode assigns each running ECS task a dedicated elastic networking interface, allowing containers full networking features in a VPC, just like EC2 instances.

Bridge
This mode creates a Linux bridge that connects all containers running on the host in a local virtual network, which can be accessed through the host's default network connection.

Host
This mode adds containers directly to the host’s network stack, exposing containers on the host's network with no isolation.

None
This mode disables external networking for containers.

Load Balancing

Amazon ECS is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing, allowing you to distribute traffic across your containers using Application Load Balancers or Network Load Balancers. You specify the task definition and the load balancer to use, and Amazon ECS automatically adds and removes containers from the load balancer. You can specify a dynamic port in the task definition, which gives your container an unused port when it is scheduled on an EC2 instance. You can also use path-based routing to share a load balancer with multiple services.

Monitoring

Amazon ECS provides monitoring capabilities for your containers and clusters through Amazon CloudWatch. You can monitor average and aggregate CPU and memory utilization of running tasks as grouped by task definition, service, or cluster. You can also set CloudWatch alarms to alert you when your containers or clusters need to scale up or down.

Logging

Amazon ECS allows you to record all your Amazon ECS API calls and have the log files delivered to you through Amazon CloudTrail. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by Amazon ECS. CloudTrail provides you a history of API calls made from the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Web Services SDKs, and Amazon CLI. It enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.

Amazon Config

Amazon Config integrates with Amazon ECS to provide you visibility into your configuration of Amazon Web Services resources in your Amazon Web Services account. Amazon Config allows you to monitor and track how resources were configured, how they relate to one another, and how the configurations and relationships change over time. Amazon Config enables you to simplify compliance and security, operational troubleshooting, and resource administration.