How to put fluentd containers behind a load balancer in ECS?

Question

So in ECS, we have ALB's which only route traffic on http/https. As fluentd containers listen on a different tcp port, how can we load balance them in ECS? I know we can use classic loadbalancer in ECS, but I wanted to avoid using classic ELB in ECS.

To give a background, in our SOA architecture there are many services in ECS and I want to use the docker fluentd logging driver to route the logs to the fluentd container.

Is it a good practice to put multiple fluentd containers behind a loadbalancer? Any other suggestions welcome.

Answer 1

I run a number of fluentd services in ECS behind classic ELB load balancers. It works really well and the inability to use dynamic ports hasn't been an issue given the number of hosts in the cluster.

You also now have the option of using the network load balancer . An NLB allows you to use dynamic port mapping with TCP. Read the documentation and see if it works for you. I didn't use it because it doesn't work across VPC peering connections.