Accessing Amazon ECS Environment Variables For Debugging

Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service supports both single and multi-container Docker environments through Amazon ECS. Despite being in its infancy, Amazon ECS does provide an adequate environment for scaling Docker containers, though debugging those containers can present a challenge.

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Cronally vs Periodic Tasks

Amazon recently announced support for periodic tasks in Elastic Beanstalk. This can be an ideal solution for some users who:

  • are already using a worker tier
  • aren’t accessing data on the web server
  • can tolerate inaccuracies in job timing

If you’re not already using a worker tier for your Elastic Beanstalk environment, the costs involved with running a dedicated EC2 instance purely for a handful of scheduled tasks isn’t all that enticing. The other issue this creates has to do with how work is sent to the worker tier instances.

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