Creating an Amazon ECS cluster for the External launch type - Amazon Elastic Container Service
Next steps

Creating an Amazon ECS cluster for the External launch type

You create a cluster to define the infrastructure your tasks and services run on.

Before you begin, be sure that you've completed the steps in Set up to use Amazon ECS and assign the appropriate IAM permission. For more information, see Amazon ECS cluster examples. The Amazon ECS console provides a simple way to create the resources that are needed by an Amazon ECS cluster by creating a AWS CloudFormation stack.

To make the cluster creation process as easy as possible, the console has default selections for many choices which we describe below. There are also help panels available for most of the sections in the console which provide further context.

You can modify the following options:

  • Add a namespace to the cluster.

    A namespace allows services that you create in the cluster can connect to the other services in the namespace without additional configuration. For more information, see Interconnect Amazon ECS services.

  • Configure the cluster for external instances

  • Assign a AWS KMS key for your managed storage. For information about how to create a key, see Create a KMS key in the AWS Key Management Service User Guide.

  • Add tags to help you identify your cluster.

To create a new cluster (Amazon ECS console)

  1. Open the console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ecs/v2.

  2. From the navigation bar, select the Region to use.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Clusters.

  4. On the Clusters page, choose Create cluster.

  5. Under Cluster configuration, configure the following:

    • For Cluster name, enter a unique name.

      The name can contain up to 255 letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and hyphens.

    • (Optional) To have the namespace used for Service Connect be different from the cluster name, for Namespace, enter a unique name.

  6. (Optional) Use Container Insights, expand Monitoring, and then choose one of the following options:

    • To use the recommended Container Insights with enhanced observability, choose Container Insights with enhanced observability.

    • To use Container Insights, choose Container Insights.

  7. (Optional) To use ECS Exec to debug tasks in the cluster, expand Troubleshooting configuration, and then configure the following:

    • Select Turn on ECS Exec.

    • (Optional) For AWS KMS key for ECS Exec, enter the ARN of the AWS KMS key you want to use to encrypt the ECS Exec session data.

    • (Optional) For ECS Exec logging, choose the log destination:

      • To send logs to CloudWatch Logs, choose Amazon CloudWatch.

      • To send logs to Amazon S3, choose Amazon S3.

      • To disable logging, choose None.

  8. (Optional) Encrypt the data on managed storage. Under Encryption, for Managed storage, enter the ARN of the AWS KMS key you want to use to encrypt the managed storage data.

  9. (Optional) To help identify your cluster, expand Tags, and then configure your tags.

    [Add a tag] Choose Add tag and do the following:

    • For Key, enter the key name.

    • For Value, enter the key value.

  10. Choose Create.

Next steps

You must register the instances with the cluster. For more information, see Registering an external instance to an Amazon ECS cluster.

Create a task definition for the external launch type. For more information, see Creating an Amazon ECS task definition using the console

Run your applications as standalone tasks, or as part of a service. For more information, see the following: