Amazon EC2 Container Service is Now Generally Available

Posted on: Apr 9, 2015

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure. With simple API calls, you can launch and stop container-enabled applications, query the complete state of your cluster, and access many familiar features like Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes, security groups, and IAM roles.

New Features:


You can now use the Amazon ECS Service scheduler to 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 your containers that become unhealthy or stop running to ensure you have the desired number of healthy containers supporting your application. You can use the Service scheduler to easily scale up and down the number of containers supporting your application, and 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.

Amazon ECS allows you to mount volumes to store and share information between containers and use images from private Docker repositories. You can also record all your EC2 Container Service API calls to AWS CloudTrail.

Amazon ECS is now generally available to all AWS customers in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions. Read our documentation to learn how to use the Amazon EC2 Container Service Management Console, AWS CLI or SDKs to get started.

For more information about Amazon EC2 Container Service, please visit our product page.