Amazon ECS Console support for ECS-optimized Amazon Linux 2 AMI and Amazon EC2 A1 instance family now available

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports using the Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Amazon Machine Image (AMI) optimized for ECS, and also the Amazon EC2 A1 instance family, directly from the Amazon ECS console during cluster creation.

Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, which provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. Previously, to add instances using the ECS-optimized AL2 AMI, or A1 instances, to your ECS cluster required manually adding instances to the cluster through the AWS CLI or by using a CloudFormation template.

Now, you can set your ECS cluster to use AL2 AMI instances in the Amazon ECS console by selecting the Amazon Linux 2 AMI when creating your cluster. In regions where the A1 instance is available, you can also create an ECS cluster based on A1 instances in the Amazon ECS console by selecting any of the A1 instance types when creating your cluster.

To learn more, visit the Amazon ECS documentation.

Please visit the AWS region table to see all AWS regions where Amazon ECS is available.