Amazon Elastic Container Service adds support for Task Health Management and Health Checks

Amazon Elastic Container Service has now added support for the Docker Container Health Checks. It provisions control to the customer over monitoring the health of the task and enhances the ability of the Elastic Container Service scheduler to make sure that the services are healthy. 

Earlier the Elastic Container Service Scheduler depends on the Elastic Load Balancer to report the container health status and to restart the unhealthy containers. For this, you need to set the Elastic Container Service to utilize the load balance and only supported TCP and HTTP health checks. 

With the addition to support added for Elastic Load Balancer health checks, the Amazon Elastic Container Service integrates with the Docker container Health checks to allows the customers to monitor and define the health of each container. By utilizing the HEALTHCHECK command you can now specify which parameter to monitor for each container in the Task Definition. Operating task or group of running containers are now assigned a health status that is based on the health of the essential containers and the task’s health status is now incorporated with the Elastic Container Service scheduler to automatically restart the unhealthy tasks and conduct rolling updates of the services. You can also check the health status of the containers and task in the Elastic Container System or with the Elastic Container Service DescribeTasks API. Visit the Amazon ECS documentation to learn more about the services and the latest updates.