Configuring a load balancer for the rolling update deployment type

The classic Amazon ECS console is reaching the end of life and will no longer be available after December 4, 2023. We recommend that you switch immediately to the new Amazon ECS console for a better experience. You can review and follow the new Amazon ECS console roadmap on GitHub.

If your service's tasks take a while to start and respond to Elastic Load Balancing health checks, you can specify a health check grace period of up to 2,147,483,647 seconds (about 68 years). During that time, the service scheduler ignores health check status. This grace period can prevent the service scheduler from marking tasks as unhealthy and stopping them before they have time to come up. This is only valid if your service is configured to use a load balancer.

To configure a health check grace period

1. If you didn't do so already, follow the basic service configuration procedures in Step 1: Configuring basic service parameters.

2. For Health check grace period: Enter the period of time, in seconds, that the Amazon ECS service scheduler ignores unhealthy Elastic Load Balancing target health checks after a task has first started.

To configure your service to use a load balancer, you must choose the load balancer type to use with your service.

To choose a load balancer type

1. If you didn't do so already, follow the basic service creation procedures in Step 1: Configuring basic service parameters.

2. For Load balancer type, choose the load balancer type to use with your service:

   Application Load Balancer

   Allows containers to use dynamic host port mapping. With host port mapping allowed, you can place multiple tasks using the same port on a single container instance. Multiple services can use the same listener port on a single load balancer with rule-based routing and paths.

   Network Load Balancer

   Allows containers to use dynamic host port mapping. With host port mapping allowed, you can place multiple tasks using the same port on a single container instance. Multiple services can use the same listener port on a single load balancer with rule-based routing.

   We recommend that you use Application Load Balancers for your Amazon ECS services. That way, you can use the advanced features of Application Load Balancer.

3. For Select IAM role for service, choose Create new role to create the Amazon ECS service-linked role or select your existing service-linked role.

4. For ELB Name, choose the name of the load balancer to use with your service. Only load balancers that correspond to the load balancer type that you selected earlier are visible here.

5. The next step depends on the load balancer type for your service. If you've chosen an Application Load Balancer, follow the steps in To configure an Application Load Balancer. If you've chosen a Network Load Balancer, follow the steps in To configure a Network Load Balancer.

To configure an Application Load Balancer

1. For Container to load balance, choose the container and port combination from your task definition that your load balancer distributes traffic to, and choose Add to load balancer.

2. For Listener port, choose the listener port and protocol of the listener that you created in Creating an Application Load Balancer (if applicable). Alternatively, choose create new to create a new listener and then enter a port number and choose a port protocol for Listener protocol.

3. For Target group name, choose the target group that you created in Creating an Application Load Balancer (if applicable), or choose create new to create a new target group.

   Important

   If your service's task definition uses the awsvpc network mode (which is required for the Fargate launch type), your target group must use ip as the target type, not instance. This is because tasks that use the awsvpc network mode are associated with an elastic network interface, not an Amazon EC2 instance.

4. (Optional) If you chose to create a new target group, complete the following fields as follows:

   • For Target group name, a default name is provided for you.

   • For Target group protocol, enter the protocol to use for routing traffic to your tasks.

   • For Path pattern, if your listener doesn't have any existing rules, the default path pattern (/) is used. If your listener already has a default rule, then you must enter a path pattern that matches traffic that you want to have sent to your service's target group. For example, if your service is a web application called web-app, and you want traffic that matches http://my-elb-url/web-app to route to your service, then enter /web-app* as your path pattern. For more information, see ListenerRules in the User Guide for Application Load Balancers.

   • For Health check path, enter the path that the load balancer sends health check pings to.

5. When you're finished configuring your Application Load Balancer, choose Next step.

To configure a Network Load Balancer

1. For Container to load balance, choose the container and port combination from your task definition that your load balancer should distribute traffic to, and choose Add to load balancer.

2. For Listener port, choose the listener port and protocol of the listener that you created in Creating a Network Load Balancer (if applicable), or choose create new to create a new listener and then enter a port number and choose a port protocol for Listener protocol.

3. For Target group name, choose the target group that you created in Creating a Network Load Balancer (if applicable), or choose create new to create a new target group.

   Important

   If your service's task definition uses the awsvpc network mode (which is required for the Fargate launch type), your target group must use ip as the target type, not instance. This is because tasks that use the awsvpc network mode are associated with an elastic network interface, not an Amazon EC2 instance.

4. (Optional) If you chose to create a new target group, complete the following fields as follows:

   • For Target group name, a default name is provided for you.

   • For Target group protocol, enter the protocol to use for routing traffic to your tasks.

   • For Health check path, enter the path that the load balancer sends health check pings to.

5. When you're finished configuring your Network Load Balancer, choose Next Step.