Amazon ECS improves console first run experience, ability to troubleshoot Docker errors

Today Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) added a new first run experience that streamlines getting your first containerized application running on ECS. Amazon 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 Docker-enabled applications, query the complete state of your cluster, and access many familiar features like security groups, Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes, and IAM roles. You can start with the sample application or provide a Docker image and ECS will create all the resources required to run your containerized application on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

For clusters created in the new first run experience, you can now scale EC2 instances up and down directly in the cluster’s ECS instances tab in the console. This gives you an easier way to manage your cluster’s capacity.

ECS also added task stopped reasons and task start and stop times. You can now see if a task was stopped by a user or stopped due to other reasons such as a failing Elastic Load Balancing health check, as well as the time the task was started and stopped.

Service scheduler error messages have additional information that describe why tasks cannot be placed in the cluster. These changes make it easier to diagnose problems.

These improvements came directly from your feedback. To get started with ECS, go to the console’s new first run wizard. And thank you for the input!