Introducing Service Discovery for Amazon ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now includes integrated service discovery that makes it easy for your containerized services to discover and connect with each other.

Previously, to ensure that services were able to discover and connect with each other, you had to configure and run your own service discovery system or connect every service to a load balancer. Now, you can enable service discovery for your containerized services with a simple selection in the ECS console, AWS CLI, or using the ECS API.

Amazon ECS creates and manages a registry of service names using the Route 53 Auto Naming API. Names are automatically mapped to a set of DNS records so you can refer to services by an alias, and have this alias automatically resolve to the service’s endpoint at runtime. You can specify health check conditions in a service's task definition and Amazon ECS will ensure that only healthy service endpoints are returned by a service lookup.

When you use Amazon ECS service discovery, you pay for the Route 53 resources that you consume, including each namespace that you create, and for the lookup queries your services make. Service health checks are provided at no cost. For more information on pricing, please see the documentation. Today, service discovery is available for Amazon ECS tasks using AWS Fargate or the EC2 launch type with awsvpc networking mode.

To learn more, visit the Amazon ECS Service Discovery documentation.

You can use Amazon ECS Service Discovery in all AWS regions where Amazon ECS and Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming are available. These include US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions. For more information on AWS regions and services, please visit the AWS global region table.