Amazon ECS Supports Container Health Checks and Task Health Management

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports Docker container health checks. This gives you more control over monitoring the health of your tasks and improves the ability of the ECS service scheduler to ensure your services are healthy.

Previously, the ECS service scheduler relied on the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to report container health status and to restart unhealthy containers. This required you to configure your ECS Service to use a load balancer, and only supported HTTP and TCP health-checks.

Now, in addition to supporting ELB health checks, Amazon ECS integrates with Docker container health checks to allow you to explicitly define and monitor the health of each container. Using the HEALTHCHECK command, you can define which parameters to monitor for each container in your Task Definition. Running tasks (groups of running containers) are now assigned a health status based on the health of their essential containers, and the task's health status is integrated with the ECS service scheduler to automatically redeploy unhealthy tasks and conduct rolling-updates of services. You can check the health status of your tasks and containers in the ECS Console or with the ECS DescribeTasks API.

To learn more, visit the Amazon ECS documentation. You can get more information about Amazon ECS on the product page.

Amazon ECS is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), GovCloud (US), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), EU(Paris), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and China (Beijing) regions. For more information on AWS regions and service, please visit here.