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Amazon ECS 0.36.1Last updated in version 0.35.3

ECS Deploy Check Scripts

View Source Release Notes

This folder contains helper binaries used to check the status of an ECS deployment from the terraform modules. These binaries are used to workaround the limitations of terraform in checking the successful deployment of ECS services.

Why not rely on the existing terraform deployment results?

Terraform's ECS modules simply check if the deployment of a task has been scheduled to the cluster and does not actually check whether or not the deployment was successful. As such, you can encounter failure scenarios where the deployment fails due to various circumstances (e.g cluster does not have enough capacity) but terraform returns a successful status. These binaries are designed to ensure the task has actually been scheduled on the cluster and is healthy.

Available Binaries

  • check-ecs-service-deployment: This binary checks the status of a ECS service and verifies that the requested tasks have been successfully scheduled on the cluster. Specifically, this binary will:

    • Check that the expected task definition is deployed and active on the service
    • [optional] Check that the ALB/NLB healthcheck is returning successfully on the service (does not work with ELB classic)

Requirements for running

The host machine must have a valid python interpreter available in the PATH under the name python. The binary supports python versions 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11.

Using the check-ecs-service-deployment helper

The helper binary is intended to be used as a local exec provisioner. The directives for the helper are already included as part of the various terraform modules for ECS included in this repository. The helper will exit with a failure if the ECS service fails any of the checks included with the helper, thus causing the terraform deployment to fail. You can configure the behavior of the checks through various module options provided by the ECS service modules in this repository. Refer to the available vars in each module for more details.

However, if you wish to run it yourself, the check-ecs-service-deployment binary has the following prerequisites:

  1. It must be run on the host machine executing terraform.
  2. AWS credentials must be configured on the host machine using either a credentials file or environment variables.

To run the binary, you need to pass it the name of the ECS cluster, the service to check, and the desired task definition that is supposed to be running on the service as command line arguments:

check-ecs-service-deployment --aws-region us-east-1 --ecs-cluster-name my-ecs-cluster --ecs-service-name my-ecs-service --ecs-task-definition nginx:1

You can also use the optional --check-timeout-seconds parameter to configure how many seconds to wait before timing out each check and declaring that the task has failed to deploy. Note that the timeout resets after each check, so the total timeout for the full check will by 2x this value. This will default to 600.

Additionally, you can skip the load balancer checks using the optional --no-loadbalancer parameter. This will tell the binary to only check for the tasks to be active.

Also, if you are checking the deployment of daemon services, provide the --daemon-check option, which will cause the helper to validate that the task is running on all container instances.

You can see all the available and required options via the help command for the helper:

check-ecs-service-deployment --help

Building the check-ecs-service-deployment helper

As such, the binary only needs to be built when the requirements change. You do not need to rebuild the binary for any changes to the source files in the aws_auth_configmap_generator library.

The binary is generated using the pex utility. Pex will package the python script with all its requirements into a single binary, that can be made to be compatible with multiple versions of python and multiple OS platforms.

To build the binary, you will need the following:

  • A working python environment with python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11.
  • tox and pex installed (use pip3 install -r dev_requirements.txt)

You can then build the binary using the helper script build.sh which will build the binary and copy it to the bin directory for distribution.

It is recommended to use pyenv to help setup an environment with multiple python interpreters. The latest binaries are built with the following python environment:

pyenv shell 3.8.0 3.9.0 3.10.0 3.11.0