Provide hostname to Schema Registry instances running within ECS

Question

I am building a redundant Schema Registry hosted in Amazon for our MSK Kafka Cluster by using an ECS cluster.

The SchemaRegistry TaskDefinition needs to define a hostname which is unique to each Task when running.

SchemaRegistryTaskDefinition:
    Type: AWS::ECS::TaskDefinition
    Properties:
      Family: !Ref SchemaRegistryTaskName
      RequiresCompatibilities: [ EC2 ]
      NetworkMode: bridge
      Cpu: !Ref CPUReservation
      Memory: !Ref MemoryReservation
      Volumes: []
      ContainerDefinitions:
        - Name: !Ref SchemaRegistryTaskName
          Image: !Ref SchemaRegistryTaskImage
          Essential: true
          PortMappings:
            - ContainerPort: !Ref SchemaRegistryPort
              HostPort: 0 # Randomly assigned port from the ephemeral port range.
          Environment:
            - Name: AWS_DEFAULT_REGION
              Value: !Ref AWS::Region
            - Name: SCHEMA_REGISTRY_KAFKASTORE_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS
              Value: !Ref MskBrokerUrls
            - Name: SCHEMA_REGISTRY_HOST_NAME
              Value: $HOSTNAME
          LogConfiguration:
            LogDriver: awslogs
            Options:
              awslogs-group: !Ref 'CloudwatchLogsGroup'
              awslogs-region: !Ref 'AWS::Region'

NB: Using $Hostname works when running the docker container directly in an EC2 instance via the cli because shell substitutes in the fully qualified hostname which is unique; but I am stumped trying to figure out how to make this work within ECS & CloudFormation.

Answer 1

What I did is to have entrypoint script in Docker image, which will do a look up from ECS meta, and expose values as environment SCHEMA_REGISTRY_HOST_NAME. Please find below sample script.

#!/bin/sh

#########
# Detect whether this is running in an ECS cluster
#########
curl --max-time 1 -s --fail -o /dev/null http://169.254.169.254/
if [[ 0 -eq $? ]]; then
    echo "AWS environment was detected - looking up HOST IP from metadata"
    SCHEMA_REGISTRY_HOST_NAME=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4 -s)
    export SCHEMA_REGISTRY_HOST_NAME
else
    echo "Not running in AWS environment. Will not set SCHEMA_REGISTRY_HOST_NAME"
fi

You can also take a look at this one on how to do local testing/development as well.