Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Amazon ECS container agent

The Amazon ECS agent is a process that runs on every container instance that is registered with your cluster. It facilitates the communication between your container instances and Amazon ECS.

Each Amazon ECS container agent version supports a different feature set and provides bug fixes from previous versions. When possible, we always recommend using the latest version of the Amazon ECS container agent. To update your container agent to the latest version, see Updating the Amazon ECS container agent.

The Amazon ECS container agent contains the amazon-ecs-pause image.Amazon ECS uses this image for tasks that use awsvpc network mode.

To see which features and enhancements are included with each agent release, see https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent/releases.

Lifecycle

When the Amazon ECS container agent registers an Amazon EC2 instance to your cluster, the Amazon EC2 instance reports its status as ACTIVE and its agent connection status as TRUE. This container instance can accept run task requests.

If you stop (not terminate) a container instance, the status remains ACTIVE, but the agent connection status transitions to FALSE within a few minutes. Any tasks that were running on the container instance stop. If you start the container instance again, the container agent reconnects with the Amazon ECS service, and you are able to run tasks on the instance again.

If you change the status of a container instance to DRAINING, new tasks are not placed on the container instance. Any service tasks running on the container instance are removed, if possible, so that you can perform system updates. For more information, see Draining Amazon ECS container instances.

If you deregister or terminate a container instance, the container instance status changes to INACTIVE immediately, and the container instance is no longer reported when you list your container instances. However, you can still describe the container instance for one hour following termination. After one hour, the instance description is no longer available.

Amazon ECS-optimized AMI

The Linux variants of the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI use the Amazon Linux 2 AMI as their base. The Amazon Linux 2 source AMI name for each variant can be retrieved by querying the Systems Manager Parameter Store API. For more information, see Retrieving Amazon ECS-optimized Linux AMI metadata. When you launch our container instances from the most recent Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux 2 AMI you receive the current container agent version. To launch a container instance with the latest Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux 2 AMI, see Launching an Amazon ECS Linux container instance.

Additional information

The following pages provide additional information about the changes:

Amazon ECS container agent log configuration parameters

The Amazon ECS container agent stores logs on your container instances.

For container agent version 1.36.0 and later, by default the logs are located at /var/log/ecs/ecs-agent.log on Linux instances and at C:\ProgramData\Amazon\ECS\log\ecs-agent.log on Windows instances.

For container agent version 1.35.0 and earlier, by default the logs are located at /var/log/ecs/ecs-agent.log.timestamp on Linux instances and at C:\ProgramData\Amazon\ECS\log\ecs-agent.log.timestamp on Windows instances.

By default, the agent logs are rotated hourly with a maximum of 24 logs being stored.

The following are the container agent configuration variables that can be used to change the default agent logging behavior. For more information, see Amazon ECS container agent configuration.

For container agent version 1.36.0 and later, the following is an example log file when the logfmt format is used.

level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Loading configuration" module=agent.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Image excluded from cleanup: amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest" module=parse.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Image excluded from cleanup: amazon/amazon-ecs-pause:0.1.0" module=parse.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Amazon ECS agent Version: 1.36.0, Commit: ca640387" module=agent.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Creating root ecs cgroup: /ecs" module=init_linux.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Creating cgroup /ecs" module=cgroup_controller_linux.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Loading state!" module=statemanager.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Event stream ContainerChange start listening..." module=eventstream.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Restored cluster 'auto-robc'" module=agent.go
level=info time=2019-12-12T23:43:29Z msg="Restored from checkpoint file. I am running as 'arn:aws:ecs:us-west-2:0123456789:container-instance/auto-robc/3330a8a91d15464ea30662d5840164cd' in cluster 'auto-robc'" module=agent.go         

The following is an example log file when the JSON format is used.

{"time": "2019-11-07T22:52:02Z", "level": "info", "msg": "Starting Amazon Elastic Container Service Agent", "module": "engine.go"}

For container agent versions 1.35.0 and earlier, the following is the format of the log file.

2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Starting Agent: Amazon ECS Agent - v1.12.0 (895f3c1)
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Loading configuration
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [WARN] Invalid value for task cleanup duration, will be overridden to 3h0m0s, parsed value 0, minimum threshold 1m0s
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Checkpointing is enabled. Attempting to load state
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Loading state! module="statemanager"
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Detected Docker versions [1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22]
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Registering Instance with ECS
2016-08-15T15:54:41Z [INFO] Registered! module="api client"