Posted On: Apr 3, 2017

The Amazon EC2 Container Service Command Line Interface (ECS CLI) has been updated to version 0.5.0. This update includes support for managing images in the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR), support for existing ELB/ALBs using the CreateService command, as well as supporting the use of R4 EC2 instance types for container clusters.

Previously, using the ECS CLI to manage ECR images was a multi-step process requiring commands in the AWS CLI, Docker CLI, and ECS CLI. Now, developers can push, pull, and list images in the ECR with a single command from the ECS CLI.

Previously, attaching an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) or Application Load Balancer (ALB) to a new ECS service could only be done manually through the AWS Console. Now, you can attach an existing ELB or ALB to your service using the CreateService command in the ECS CLI.

In addition, the ECS CLI now supports container clusters on EC2 R4 instance types as part of the CloudFormation template called during cluster creation. R4 instances are optimized for memory-intensive applications and offer better price per GiB of RAM than R3 instances.

For more information on installing and using the ECS CLI, please see the documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ECS_CLI.html.