Use a Gateway Load Balancer for Amazon ECS - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Use a Gateway Load Balancer for Amazon ECS

A Gateway Load Balancer operates at the third layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the network layer. It listens for all IP packets across all ports and forwards traffic to the target group that's specified in the listener rule. It maintains stickiness of flows to a specific target appliance using 5-tuple (for TCP/UDP flows) or 3-tuple (for non-TCP/UDP flows). For example, if your task's container definition specifies port 80 for an NGINX container port, and port 0 for the host port, then the host port is dynamically chosen from the ephemeral port range of the container instance (such as 32768 to 61000 on the latest Amazon ECS-optimized AMI). When the task is launched, the NGINX container is registered with the Gateway Load Balancer as an instance ID and port combination, and traffic is distributed to the instance ID and port corresponding to that container. This dynamic mapping allows you to have multiple tasks from a single service on the same container instance. For more information, see What is a Gateway Load Balancer in Gateway Load Balancers.

For information about the best practices for setting parameters to speed up you deployments see:

Consider the following when using Gateway Load Balancers with Amazon ECS:

  • Amazon ECS requires the service-linked IAM role which provides the permissions needed to register and deregister targets with your load balancer when tasks are created and stopped. For more information, see Using service-linked roles for Amazon ECS.

  • For services with tasks using the awsvpc network mode, when you create a target group for your service, you must choose ip as the target type, not instance. This is because tasks that use the awsvpc network mode are associated with an elastic network interface, not an Amazon EC2 instance.

  • Your load balancer subnet configuration must include all Availability Zones that your container instances reside in.

  • After you create a service, the load balancer configuration can't be changed from the Amazon Web Services Management Console. You can use the Amazon Copilot, Amazon CloudFormation, Amazon CLI or SDK to modify the load balancer configuration for the ECS rolling deployment controller only, not Amazon CodeDeploy blue/green or external. When you add, update, or remove a load balancer configuration, Amazon ECS starts a new deployment with the updated Elastic Load Balancing configuration. This causes tasks to register to and deregister from load balancers. We recommend that you verify this on a test environment before you update the Elastic Load Balancing configuration. For information about how to modify the configuration, see UpdateService in the Amazon Elastic Container Service API Reference.

  • If a service task fails the load balancer health check criteria, the task is stopped and restarted. This process continues until your service reaches the number of desired running tasks.

  • When you use a Gateway Load Balancer configured with IP addresses as targets, requests are seen as coming from the Gateway Load Balancers private IP address. This means that services behind an Gateway Load Balancer are effectively open to the world as soon as you allow incoming requests and health checks in the target security group.

  • For Fargate tasks, you must use platform version 1.4.0 (Linux) or 1.0.0 (Windows).

  • If you are experiencing problems with your load balancer-enabled services, see Troubleshooting service load balancers in Amazon ECS.

  • Your tasks and load balancer must be in the same VPC.

  • Use a unique target group for each service.

    Using the same target group for multiple services might lead to issues during service deployments.

For information about how to create a Gateway Load Balancer, see Create a Gateway Load Balancer in Gateway Load Balancers

Important

If your service's task definition uses the awsvpc network mode (which is required for the Fargate launch type), you must choose ip as the target type, not instance. This is because tasks that use the awsvpc network mode are associated with an elastic network interface, not an Amazon EC2 instance.

You cannot register instances by instance ID if they have the following instance types: C1, CC1, CC2, CG1, CG2, CR1, G1, G2, HI1, HS1, M1, M2, M3, and T1. You can register instances of these types by IP address.