Question: Ubuntu vs Amazon linux for ECS nodes

[dbrandt]

What's the benefit to rolling your own ECS node AMIs over using what Amazon provides?

A few months ago I set up a couple of ASG-backed ECS clusters using Ubuntu 14.04 for the nodes. Things work OK, but a couple of things are wonky (for example, some data is missing in CloudWatch) which made me doubt my choice and make me consider using Amazons pre-made ECS AMIs going forward. I originally chose 14.04 for consistency with our existing stack and build environment, but that doesn't really matter for the containers...

[alani]

Haven't contributed to this repo (yet), however I can say baking your own AMI comes with several advantages i.e. maybe I want to install custom toolsets or improve hardening. Based on the AMI created with packer in this repo, here are some of the changes made by the Segment stack:

• Utilize systemd and journald
• Install additional packages from apt
• Run specific containers on image start, e.g:
  • ecs-agent: run a specific version of the agent with custom config
  • ecs-logs: enables the log centralization feature. Reads from journald and sends logs to CloudWatch
• Other changes on start such as potential cloud-init changes (didn't look too closely), log rotation, tcp/ip stack changes, and more.

[achille-roussel]

I believe you could achieve those things with the ECS-optimized AMI from AWS, it's really just a matter of using the tool that fits your needs.

Stack defaults to using ubuntu because it's a popular distribution and you have a lot of learning material out there, but you can use any AMI you want with the stack modules.