Managing Amazon ECS container instances remotely using Amazon Systems Manager - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Managing Amazon ECS container instances remotely using Amazon Systems Manager

You can use the Run Command capability in Amazon Systems Manager (Systems Manager) to securely and remotely manage the configuration of your Amazon ECS container instances. Run Command provides a simple way to perform common administrative tasks without logging on locally to the instance. You can manage configuration changes across your clusters by simultaneously executing commands on multiple container instances. Run Command reports the status and results of each command.

Here are some examples of the types of tasks you can perform with Run Command:

  • Install or uninstall packages.

  • Perform security updates.

  • Clean up Docker images.

  • Stop or start services.

  • View system resources.

  • View log files.

  • Perform file operations.

For more information about Run Command, see Amazon Systems Manager Run Command in the Amazon Systems Manager User Guide.

The following are prequisites to using Systems Manager with Amazon ECS.

  1. You must grant the container instance role (ecsInstanceRole) permissions to access the Systems Manager APIs. You can do this by assigning the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore to the ecsInstanceRole role. For information about how to attach a policy to a role, see Modifying a role permissions policy (console) in the Amazon Identity and Access Management User Guide

  2. Verify that SSM Agent is installed on your container instances. For more information, see Manually install SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Linux.

After you attach Systems Manager managed policies to your ecsInstanceRole and verify that Amazon Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is installed on your container instances, you can start using Run Command to send commands to your container instances. For information about running commands and shell scripts on your instances and viewing the resulting output, see Running Commands Using Systems Manager Run Command and Run Command Walkthroughs in the Amazon Systems Manager User Guide.

A common use case is to update container instance software with Run Command. You can follow the procedues in the Amazon Systems Manager User Guide with the following parameters.

Parameter Value

Command document

 AWS-RunShellScript
Command 
$ yum update -y
Target instances Your container instances