Troubleshooting AWS Batch

You might find the need to troubleshoot issues with your compute environments, job queues, job definitions, or jobs. This chapter helps you troubleshoot and repair issues with your AWS Batch environment.

INVALID Compute Environment

It's possible to incorrectly configure a managed compute environment so that it enters an INVALID state and cannot accept jobs for placement. These sections describe the possible causes and how to fix them.

Incorrect Role Name or ARN

The most common cause for invalid compute environments is an incorrect name or ARN for the AWS Batch service role or the Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role. This is more of an issue for compute environments that are created with the AWS CLI or the AWS SDKs. When you create a compute environment in the AWS Management Console, AWS Batch can help you choose the correct service or Spot Fleet roles. However, you can't misspell the name or deform the ARN.

However, if you manually type the name or ARN for an IAM in an AWS CLI command or your SDK code, AWS Batch can't validate the string and it accepts the bad value and attempts to create the environment. After failing to create the environment, the environment moves to an INVALID state, and you see the following errors.

For an invalid service role:

CLIENT_ERROR - Not authorized to perform sts:AssumeRole (Service: AWSSecurityTokenService; Status Code: 403; Error Code: AccessDenied; Request ID: dc0e2d28-2e99-11e7-b372-7fcc6fb65fe7)

For an invalid Spot Fleet role:

CLIENT_ERROR - Parameter: SpotFleetRequestConfig.IamFleetRole is invalid. (Service: AmazonEC2; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidSpotFleetRequestConfig; Request ID: 331205f0-5ae3-4cea-bac4-897769639f8d)  Parameter: SpotFleetRequestConfig.IamFleetRole is invalid

One common cause for this issue is if you only specify the name of an IAM role when using the AWS CLI or the AWS SDKs, instead of the full ARN. This is because depending on how you created the role, the ARN might contain a service-role path prefix. For example, if you manually create the AWS Batch service role using the procedures in AWS Batch service IAM role, your service role ARN would look like this:

arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/AWSBatchServiceRole

However, if you created the service role as part of the console first run wizard today, your service role ARN would look like this:

arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/service-role/AWSBatchServiceRole

When you only specify the name of an IAM role when using the AWS CLI or the AWS SDKs, AWS Batch assumes that your ARN doesn't use the service-role path prefix. Because of this, we recommend that you specify the full ARN for your IAM roles when you create compute environments.

To repair a compute environment that's misconfigured this way, see Repairing an INVALID Compute Environment.

Repairing an INVALID Compute Environment

When you have a compute environment in an INVALID state, you should update it to repair the invalid parameter. For the case of an Incorrect Role Name or ARN, you can update the compute environment with the correct service role.

To repair a misconfigured compute environment

1. Open the AWS Batch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/batch/.

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

3. In the navigation pane, choose Compute environments.

4. On the Compute environments page, select the radio button next to the compute environment to edit, and then choose Edit.

5. On the Update compute environment page, for Service role, choose the IAM role to use with your compute environment. The AWS Batch console only displays roles that have the correct trust relationship for compute environments.

6. Choose Save to update your compute environment.

Jobs Stuck in RUNNABLE Status

If your compute environment contains compute resources, but your jobs don't progress beyond the RUNNABLE status, then there is something preventing the jobs from actually being placed on a compute resource. Here are some common causes for this issue:

The awslogs log driver isn't configured on your compute resources

AWS Batch jobs send their log information to CloudWatch Logs. To enable this, you must configure your compute resources to use the awslogs log driver. If you base your compute resource AMI off of the Amazon ECS optimized AMI (or Amazon Linux), then this driver is registered by default with the ecs-init package. If you use a different base AMI, then you must verify that the awslogs log driver is specified as an available log driver with the ECS_AVAILABLE_LOGGING_DRIVERS environment variable when the Amazon ECS container agent is started. For more information, see Compute resource AMI specification and Creating a compute resource AMI.

Insufficient resources

If your job definitions specify more CPU or memory resources than your compute resources can allocate, then your jobs is never placed. For example, if your job specifies 4 GiB of memory, and your compute resources have less than that available, then the job can't be placed on those compute resources. In this case, you must reduce the specified memory in your job definition or add larger compute resources to your environment. Some memory is reserved for the Amazon ECS container agent and other critical system processes. For more information, see Compute Resource Memory Management.

No internet access for compute resources

Compute resources need access to communicate with the Amazon ECS service endpoint. This can be through an interface VPC endpoint or through your compute resources having public IP addresses.

For more information about interface VPC endpoints, see Amazon ECS Interface VPC Endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

If you do not have an interface VPC endpoint configured and your compute resources do not have public IP addresses, then they must use network address translation (NAT) to provide this access. For more information, see NAT gateways in the Amazon VPC User Guide. For more information, see Tutorial: Creating a VPC with Public and Private Subnets for Your Compute Environments.

Amazon EC2 instance limit reached

The number of Amazon EC2 instances that your account can launch in an AWS Region is determined by your EC2 instance limit. Certain instance types have a per-instance-type limit as well. For more information on your account's Amazon EC2 instance limits (including how to request a limit increase), see Amazon EC2 Service Limits in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances

For more information on diagnosing jobs stuck in RUNNABLE status, see Why is my AWS Batch job stuck in RUNNABLE status? in the AWS Knowledge Center.

Spot Instances Not Tagged on Creation

Spot Instance tagging for AWS Batch compute resources is supported as of October 25, 2017. Before this, the recommended IAM managed policy (AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole) for the Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role didn't contain permissions to tag Spot Instances at launch. The new recommended IAM managed policy is called AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole.

To fix Spot Instance tagging on creation, follow the following procedure to apply the current recommended IAM managed policy to your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role, and then any future Spot Instances that are created with that role have permissions to apply instance tags on creation.

To apply the current IAM managed policy to your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role

1. Open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.

2. Choose Roles, and choose your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role.

3. Choose Attach policy.

4. Select the AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole and choose Attach policy.

5. Choose your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role again to remove the previous policy.

6. Select the x to the right of the AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole policy, and choose Detach.

Spot Instances not scaling down

AWS Batch introduced the AWSServiceRoleForBatch service-linked role on March 10,2021. This service-linked role is used as the service role if no role is specified in the serviceRole parameter of the compute environment. If the service-linked role is used in an EC2 Spot compute environment, but the Spot role used does not include the AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole managed policy, the Spot instances will not scale down. The error seen is "You are not authorized to perform this operation." Use the following instruction to update the spot fleet role that you use in the spotIamFleetRole parameter. For more information, see Using service-linked roles and Creating a role to delegate permissions to an AWS Service in the IAM User Guide.

Attach AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole managed policy to your Spot Fleet role in the AWS Management Console

To apply the current IAM managed policy to your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role

1. Open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.

2. Choose Roles, and choose your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role.

3. Choose Attach policy.

4. Select the AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole and choose Attach policy.

5. Choose your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role again to remove the previous policy.

6. Select the x to the right of the AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole policy, and choose Detach.

Attach AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole managed policy to your Spot Fleet role with the AWS CLI

The example commands assume that your Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet role is named AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole. If your role uses a different name, adjust the commands to match.

To attach the AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole managed policy to your Spot Fleet role

1. To attach the AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole managed IAM policy to your AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole role, run the following command with the AWS CLI:

   aws iam attach-role-policy \
       --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole \
       --role-name AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole

2. To detach the AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole managed IAM policy from your AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole role, run the following command with the AWS CLI:

   aws iam detach-role-policy \
       --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole \
       --role-name AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole

Can't retrieve Secrets Manager secrets

If you are using an AMI with an Amazon ECS agent earlier than version 1.16.0-1, then you must use the Amazon ECS agent configuration variable ECS_ENABLE_AWSLOGS_EXECUTIONROLE_OVERRIDE=true to use this feature. You can add it to the ./etc/ecs/ecs.config file during container instance creation or you can add it to an existing instance and then restart the ECS agent. For more information, see Amazon ECS Container Agent Configuration in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

Can't override job definition resource requirements

Memory and vCPU overrides that are specified in the memory and vcpus members of the containerOverrides structure passed to SubmitJob cannot override memory and vCPU requirements that are specified in the resourceRequirements structure in the job definition.

If you try to override those resource requirements, you may receive one an error like this.

"This value was submitted in a deprecated key and may conflict with the value provided by the job definition's resource requirements."

To correct this, specify the memory and vCPU requirements in the resourceRequirements member of the containerOverrides. For example, if your memory and vCPU overrides are specified in lines like this:

"containerOverrides": {
   "memory": 8192,
   "vcpus": 4
}

Change them to lines like this:

"containerOverrides": {
   "resourceRequirements": [
      {
         "type": "MEMORY",
         "value": "8192"
      },
      {
         "type": "VCPU",
         "value": "4"
      }
   ],
}

The same should be done for the memory and vCPU requirements specified in the containerProperties object in the job definition. For example, if your memory and vCPU requirements are specified in lines like this:

{
   "containerProperties": {
      "memory": 4096,
      "vcpus": 2,
}

Change them to lines like this:

"containerProperties": {
   "resourceRequirements": [
      {
         "type": "MEMORY",
         "value": "4096"
      },
      {
         "type": "VCPU",
         "value": "2"
      }
   ],
}