CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ecs
user3547774
user3547774

Reputation: 1689

Working with ECS container instance without the EBS

I am using the free tier of AWS. I am experimenting with ECS and am following the article http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/launch_container_instance.html to create an ECS instance. One this I noticed is that using the community image amzn-ami-2016.03.e-amazon-ecs-optimized adds an EBS volume which cuts into my free tier usage. My question is, is this EBS volume required and can I do it without the EBS volume?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1532

Answers (2)

Rash
Rash

Reputation: 8197

Any EC2 instance would need a Root volume at the very least to start the OS. All volumes in AWS are EBS volumes. So if you were wondering if you can have an EC2 instance without EBS, I don't think that is possible.

However, you can still reduce your EBS cost. It costs 10 cents per GB per month for an EBS volume. If you would notice, all Amazon ECS optimized EC2 instances are configured to use 30GB of EBS volume storage. That means you pay $3.00 extra per EC2 instance for a month! 8 out of that 30 GB is for Root, and 22 out of 30GB is for docker use.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ecs-ami-storage-config.html

By default, the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI ships with 30 GiB of total storage. You can modify this value at launch time to increase or decrease the available storage on your container instance. This storage is used for the operating system and for Docker images and metadata. The sections below describe the storage configuration of the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI, based on the AMI version.

Of course, you don't need the full 8GB for Root and full 22GB for docker. So you can lower your cost by reducing the size of those volumes to say 2GB for Root and 2GB for docker use. Then you would be paying 40 cents per month, and not $3.00.

Reducing volume size, as far as I know, is not easy. Since that is out of scope for this question, I will just provide this link for interested parties.

Now that you are aware that there are 2 volumes used by ecs optimized instances, there is a way for you to NOT use the 22GB volume at all, and simply use the Root volume for docker storage. This too is not easy but can be done by creating your own AMI with docker and ecs agent installed. Then you will have to configure your docker to use the Root volume instead of the other one. Here is a thread which slightly discussed this issue.

Upvotes: 3

Piyush Patil
Piyush Patil

Reputation: 14523

For AWS ECS there is no additional charge for Amazon EC2 Container Service. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. Free tier in AWS https://aws.amazon.com/free/ only Amazon EC2 Container Registry is part of free tier which offers 500 MB for storage.

And also if you are creating ECS containers from amzn-ami-2016.03.e-amazon-ecs-optimized AMI the volumes will be EBS so you will have to pay for EBS volumes.

Upvotes: 2

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