Posted On: Nov 10, 2021

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now provides customers enhanced visibility into the health of their compute infrastructure. Customers running containerized workloads using Amazon ECS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  (Amazon EC2) or on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere can now query the health status of the container runtime (i.e Docker) for their container instances directly from the Amazon ECS API. This helps customers improve application resiliency.

Although rare, problems can arise with the host infrastructure or Docker runtime which can prevent new containers from being started and even affect containers that are already running. With today’s release, Amazon ECS automatically monitors the container runtime for responsiveness on customers’ behalf. Customers can use the ECS Describe-Instances API with the include Health Status option to view the health information for their Amazon ECS Tasks.

Customers can view the instance health status for all their Amazon ECS container instances running version 1.57.0 of the Amazon ECS container Agent or higher. This version is automatically available with version 20211103 of the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI. Amazon ECS is available in all public AWS regions. To learn more, please look at the documentation here.