Alternative service discovery without ELB for ECS-service

Question

We don't have a lot of traffic yet, but the amount of microservices are growing. As we run them inside a container and use ECS to schedule them as a Service, we have to use many ELB's which are not really routing that much traffic. It sounds a bit as overkill (and expensive) to have ELB's for every little API exposed to the internet, so I'm looking for an alternative which can be used with ECS-services.

Answer 1

One workaround for this is with Beacon . It runs as an agent on each ECS instance and publishes container start/stop events to an SNS topic. You have to write a Lambda which, when subscribed to the topic, determines the IP of the instance hosting the container and adds/removes a Route53 record for the container.