AWS ECS: Is it possible to make a scheduled ecs task accessible via ALB?

Question

my current ECS infrastructure works as follows: ALB -> ECS Fargate --> ECS service -> ECS task. Now I would like to replace the normal ECS task with a Scheduled ECS task. But nowhere do I find a way to connect the Scheduled ECS task to the service and thus make it accessible via the ALB. Isn't that possible?

Thanks in advance for answers.

Answer 1

A scheduled ECS task is it a one-off task launched with the RunTask API and that has no ties to an ALB (because it's not part of the ECS service). You could probably make this work but you'd probably need to build the wiring yourself by finding out the details of the task and adding it to the target group. I believe what you need to do (if you want ECS to deal with the wiring) is to schedule a Lambda that increments the desired number of tasks in the service. I am also wondering what the use case is for this (as maybe there are other ways to achieve it). Scheduled tasks are usually batch jobs of some sort and not web services that need to get wired to a load balancer. What is the scenario / end goal you have?

Answer 2

A scheduled task is really more for something that runs to complete a given task and then exits.

If you want to connect your ECS task to a load balancer you should run it as part of a Service. ECS will handle connecting the task to the load balancer for you when it runs as a Service.

You mentioned in comments that your end goal is to run a dev environment for a specific time each day. You can do this with an ECS service and scheduled auto-scaling . This feature isn't available through the AWS Web console for some reason, but you can configure it via the AWS CLI or one of the AWS SDKs. You would configure it to scale to 0 during the time you don't want your app running, and scale up to 1 or more during the time you do want it running.