Adding tags to an Amazon ECS container instance

You can associate tags with your container instances using one of the following methods:

• Method 1 – When creating the container instance using the Amazon EC2 API, CLI, or console, specify tags by passing user data to the instance using the container agent configuration parameter ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS. This creates tags that are associated with the container instance in Amazon ECS only, they cannot be listed using the Amazon EC2 API. For more information, see Bootstrapping Amazon ECS Linux container instances to pass data.

  Important

  If you launch your container instances using an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, then you should use the ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS agent configuration parameter to add tags. This is due to the way in which tags are added to Amazon EC2 instances that are launched using Auto Scaling groups.

  The following is an example of a user data script that associates tags with your container instance:

  #!/bin/bash
  cat <<'EOF' >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config
  ECS_CLUSTER=MyCluster
  ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS={"tag_key": "tag_value"}
  EOF

• Method 2 – When you create your container instance using the Amazon EC2 API, CLI, or console, first specify tags using the TagSpecification.N parameter. Then, pass user data to the instance by using the container agent configuration parameter ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM. Doing so propagates them from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS.

  The following is an example of a user data script that propagates the tags that are associated with an Amazon EC2 instance, and registers the instance with a cluster that's named MyCluster.

  #!/bin/bash
  cat <<'EOF' >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config
  ECS_CLUSTER=MyCluster
  ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM=ec2_instance
  EOF

  To provide access to allow container instance tags to propagate from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS, manually add the following permissions as an inline policy to the Amazon ECS container instance IAM role. For more information, see Adding and Removing IAM Policies.

  • ec2:DescribeTags

  The following is an example policy that's used to add these permissions.

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
              	"ec2:DescribeTags"
              ],
              "Resource": "*"
          }
      ]
  }

External container instances

You can associate tags with your external container instances by using one of the following methods.

• Method 1 – Before running the installation script to register your external instance with your cluster, create or edit the Amazon ECS container agent configuration file at /etc/ecs/ecs.config and add the ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS container agent configuration parameter. This creates tags that are associated with the external instance.

  The following is example syntax.

  ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS={"tag_key": "tag_value"}

• Method 2 – After your external instance is registered to your cluster, you can use the AWS Management Console to add tags. For more information, see Adding tags to existing resources (Amazon ECS console).