Restart a single exited container in an ECS task

Question

I have a container that is part of an ECS task definition, which I have marked as essential=false, because if this container goes down, I do not want the ECS agent to take down the other containers in the task. Making the container "non-essential" has achieved the desired result in my case: that container crashes, and the other containers on the task do not get taken down or restarted.

However, I do want this non-essential container to be independently restarted. Is there any built-in way to accomplish this? Basically, if the container exits, run docker start or docker restart on that container (which we are currently having to do manually). I have not had any luck so far with the documentation or from exploring the AWS console.

Answer 1

Docker provides a restart policy that would be useful in your case (--restart always), however, based on this thread, ECS does not support restarting existing containers.

The suggested and accepted workaround was:

ECS supports this use-case through the concept of a "service". Services work to continuously make the reality (known state) match the desired state, including the desired number of running tasks you specify. If a task started by a service stops, the service will create a new task to replace it. Services help you manage the number of copies you want running, deployments, binding to and unbinding from load balancers, respond to load balancer health checks, and integrate with auto scaling so your service can scale in or out automatically. You can check out the documentation for more detail.