Useless Amazon ECS Error Message when creating tasks

Question

Using the ecs agent container on an Ubuntu instance, I am able to register the agent with my cluster.

I also have a service created in that cluster and task definitions as well. When I try to add a task to the cluster I get the useless error message:

Run tasks failed
Reasons : ["ATTRIBUTE"]

The ecs agent log has no related error message. Any thoughts on how I can get better debugging or what the issue might be?

The cli also returns the same useless error message

{
    "tasks": [],
    "failures": [
        {
            "arn": "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:sssssss:container-instance/sssssssssssss",
            "reason": "ATTRIBUTE"
        }
    ]
}

Answer 1

From the troubleshooting guide:

ATTRIBUTE (container instance ID)

Your task definition contains a parameter that requires a specific container instance attribute that is not available on your container instances. For more information on which attributes are required for specific task definition parameters and agent configuration variables, see Task Definition Parameters and Amazon ECS Container Agent Configuration.

You can find the attributes required for your task definition by looking at the requiredAttributes field. You can find the attributes that are present for your container instances in the result of the DescribeContainerInstances API call.