Troubleshooting service load balancers - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Troubleshooting service load balancers

Amazon ECS services can register tasks with an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer. Load balancer configuration errors are common causes for stopped tasks. If your stopped tasks were started by services that use a load balancer, consider the following possible causes.

Amazon ECS service-linked role doesn't exist

The Amazon ECS service-linked role allows Amazon ECS services to register container instances with Elastic Load Balancing load balancers. The service-linked role must be created in your account. For more information, see Using service-linked roles for Amazon ECS.

Container instance security group

If your container is mapped to port 80 on your container instance, your container instance security group must allow inbound traffic on port 80 for the load balancer health checks to pass.

Elastic Load Balancing load balancer not configured for all Availability Zones

Your load balancer should be configured to use all of the Availability Zones in a Region, or at least all of the Availability Zones where your container instances reside. If a service uses a load balancer and starts a task on a container instance that resides in an Availability Zone that the load balancer isn't configured to use, the task never passes the health check. This results in the task being killed.

Elastic Load Balancing load balancer health check misconfigured

The load balancer health check parameters can be overly restrictive or point to resources that don't exist. If a container instance is determined to be unhealthy, it's removed from the load balancer. Be sure to verify that the following parameters are configured correctly for your service load balancer.

Ping Port

The Ping Port value for a load balancer health check is the port on the container instances that the load balancer checks to determine if it is healthy. If this port is misconfigured, the load balancer likely deregisters your container instance from itself. This port should be configured to use the hostPort value for the container in your service's task definition that you're using with the health check.

Ping Path

This value is often set to index.html, but if your service doesn't respond to that request, then the health check fails. If your container doesn't have an index.html file, you can set this to / to target the base URL for the container instance.

Response Timeout

This is the amount of time that your container has to return a response to the health check ping. If this value is lower than the amount of time required for a response, the health check fails.

Health Check Interval

This is the amount of time between health check pings. The shorter your health check intervals are, the faster your container instance can reach the Unhealthy Threshold.

Unhealthy Threshold

This is the number of times your health check can fail before your container instance is considered unhealthy. If you have an unhealthy threshold of 2, and a health check interval of 30 seconds, then your task has 60 seconds to respond to the health check ping before it's assumed unhealthy. You can raise the unhealthy threshold or the health check interval to give your tasks more time to respond.

Unable to update the service servicename: Load balancer container name or port changed in task definition

If your service uses a load balancer, you can use the Amazon CLI or SDK to modify the load balancer configuration. For information about how to modify the configuration, see UpdateService in the Amazon Elastic Container Service API Reference. If you update the task definition for the service, the container name and container port that are specified in the load balancer configuration must remain in the task definition.