So many things can go wrong with Docker


Sean Hull always has interesting things to say, and so it is worth reading what tripped him up with a recent project where he had to Dockerize everything:

When a service is run, ECS wants to have *all* of the containers running together. Just like when you use docker-compose. If one container fails, ecs-agent may decide to kill the entire service, and restart. So you may see weird things happening in “docker logs” for one container, simply because another failed. What to do?

First look at your task definition, and set “essential = false”. That way if one fails, the other will still run. So you can eliminate the working container as a cause.

Next thing is remember some containers may startup almost instantly, like nginx for example. Because it is a very small footprint, it can start in a second or two. So if *it* depends on another container that is slow, nginx will fail. That’s because in the strange world of docker discovery, that other container doesn’t even exist yet. While nginx references it, it says hey, I don’t see the upstream server you are pointing to.

Solution? Be sure you have a “links” section in your task definition. This tells ecs-agent, that one container depends on another (think of the depends_on flag in docker-compose).