AWS launches FireLens, a log router for Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate

Posted on: Nov 18, 2019

FireLens is a container log router for Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate that gives you extensibility to use the breadth of services at AWS or partner solutions for log analytics and storage. FireLens works with Fluentd and Fluent Bit. This means you can use one of the many plugins, including AWS for Fluent Bit or bring your own Fluentd output plugin.  

Previously you had to select from one of the prebuilt log drivers supported on Amazon ECS or AWS Fargate. This meant customers who wanted to select other tools for log storage or analytics such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon S3 or partner tools had to maintain additional software and were often limited to the selection embedded in the container runtime. 

FireLens gives you a simplified interface to filter logs at source, add useful metadata and send logs to almost any destination. You can now stream logs directly to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose destinations such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and partner tools. Using Amazon ECS task definition parameters, you can select destinations and optionally define filters for additional control and FireLens will ingest logs to target destinations. 

Learn more about sample workflows here, partner support here, and the documentation here.