ecs-station-agent

ecs-station-agent reads ECS state change events from SQS and stores both historical and up-to-date task state in Postgres. With current and historical data for every ECS task that you're running or have ever run, you can use simple SQL queries to answer many common questions:

• What tasks are currently running?
• Did a given task exit successfully yet?
• What tasks were running at a specific time in the past?
• How many tasks have failed over time?

ecs-station-agent is especially useful if you frequently exceed the DescribeTasks API rate limit. You can also use ecs-station-agent to write your own task schedulers or historical auditing tools.

Because ecs-station-agent is only a demo / template app, it is intentionally missing a few things:

• Tests.

• From-scratch state reconciliation. When ecs-station-agent is started for the first time, it will not have information for tasks until they change state.

• Support for databases other than Postgres.

• Support for multi-container ECS task definitions. ecs-station-agent only records the state for the first container definition.

Feel free to extend / reuse / modify ecs-station-agent!

Getting Started

To get ecs-station-agent up and running, you'll need three things:

1. CloudWatch Events > SQS pipeline

Configuring CloudWatch Events to send ECS state change events to SQS can be a bit tricky. We've written an example Terraform configuration that does this for you at terraform/queue.tf.

2. Postgres

You can use any ol' Postgres server, but we recommend running a dedicated RDS instance for this. Make sure that you can connect to Postgres from your Docker container hosts.

3. Docker host running ecs-station-agent

ecs-station-agent is available as a Docker container on Docker Hub. You can run it with:

docker run segment/ecs-station-agent -postgres <url> -sqs <url>

If you're using ECS you will likely want to create a task definition and service for this. We created a simple Terraform template for this at terraform/ecs_task_definition.tf.

See Also

Blox is a much more comprehensive suite of tools that can be used to write custom ECS task schedulers originally released by AWS itself. Blox requires running and maintaining an etcd cluster and has many more moving parts than ecs-station-agent.