aws / aws/containers-roadmap

[ECS] [request]: Access to container ports via SSM or ECS Exec

Open
#1,446 0 comments 6 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
ECS Proposed
Dominant language
Shell
Stars
5.4k
Forks
334
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

### Community Note

* Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 [reaction](https://blog.github.com/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments/) to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
* Please do not leave "+1" or "me too" comments, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request
* If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment

**Tell us about your request**
A simple way to access ports on a specific container instance in an ECS service/task.

**Which service(s) is this request for?**
ECS

**Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?**
Mainly for debugging purposes, I would like to forward a port from a specific container instance to my local machine. As I understand it, the only way to do this is by using ECS Exec (or connecting to the container instance directly and using `docker exec`) to start an interactive session, then connecting to `localhost` from inside the container. Alternatively, the below workaround also seems to work:

**Are you currently working around this issue?**
It is seemingly possible to forward a port from an ECS container using the `AWS-StartPortForwardingSession` SSM Document, by passing the ECS container details to the `target` parameter. I may have missed it but can't see this documented anywhere, so I'm hesitant to rely on it:
```
aws ssm start-session --document-name AWS-StartPortForwardingSession --target "ecs:${CLUSTER_NAME}_${TASK_ID}_${CONTAINER_RUNTIME_ID}" --parameters '{"portNumber":["1234"],"localPortNumber":["1234"]}'
```

**Additional context**
None

**Attachments**
None

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by investigating the documented ECS Exec and AWS-StartPortForwardingSession paths, using the command and ECS cluster, task, and container runtime details in the issue. Determine whether port forwarding from a specific ECS container to a local machine is supported and what documentation or service behavior would need to change; done means the supported workflow is clearly documented or the request is scoped for implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
aws
Domain
cloud
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.