How to restart containers in AWS ECS?

Question

I have provided application configuration via consul's key-value store to the application containers running in ECS services.

The application reads its configuration from consul only once on start up.

When I need to change the configuration, how should I go about restarting the containers so that the application configuration is refreshed?

I am hoping to do this programmatically via the aws cli.

Answer 1

You don't restart containers. You can however stop the individual tasks, and ECS will respawn another instance of your task somewhere on the cluster.

Answer 2

Update:

As @Aidin mentioned, you can achieve it via the AWS CLI by forcing a new deployment like so:

aws ecs update-service \
--service <service name> \
--cluster <cluster name> \
--force-new-deployment \
[--profile guestapi-dev]

Note that this does not work on services with a CodeDeploy deployment controller.

Original answer:

I faced the same challenge, and what I did was follow this guide (using the old or new console depending on your service). I don't know if this can be done via the CLI, but it does actually "restart the service" in that it re-spawns new task(s) for your service and kills the old one(s).

In summary:

In the old console:

1. Find the service in the AWS console (ECS -> Cluster -> Service).
2. Click Update in the top right corner.
3. Check the ‘Force new deployment’ box.
4. Skip the other configurations and click Update Service.

In the new console:

1. Find the service in the AWS console (ECS -> Cluster -> Service).
2. Click Edit in the top right corner.
3. Expand Deployments options
4. Check the ‘Force new deployment’ box.
5. Click Update.

The service will re-deploy. You should be able to see the existing task(s) running, the new task(s) provision and lastly the old task(s) disappear.

Answer 3

this worked for me:

aws ecs list-tasks --cluster my-cluster-name | jq -r ".taskArns[]" | awk '{print "aws ecs stop-task --cluster my-cluster-name --task \""$0"\""}' | sh

Answer 4

Go to ECS dashboard. Just stop the running task from your ECS service from aws console. it'll spawn a new task and terminate the old one.