How to register EC2 Instance to ECS cluster?

Question

I have started 2 ECS optimized instances on EC2, but how can I register them as ECS container instances ?

Can not figure out a way of doing that.

Answer 1

When you start an ECS optimized image, it starts the ECS agent on the instance by default. The ecs agent registers the instance with the default ecs cluster.

For your instance to be available on the cluster, you will have to create the default cluster.

if you have a custom ecs cluster, you can set the cluster name using the userdata section.

The ecs agent expects the cluster name inside the ecs.config file available at /etc/ecs/ecs.config.

You can set it up at instance boot up using userdata script

#!/bin/bash
echo ECS_CLUSTER={cluster_name} >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config

Please refer to the following ecs documentation for more information http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/launch_container_instance.html