[ECS] [request]: Some clearer documentation

[tonetechnician]

Hey there!

I've been attempting to use ECS Fargate with Windows containers and am running into some unclear documentation.

It seems in the documentation, platform version 1.0.0 is the latest given to Windows, and 1.4.0 is the latest given to Linux containers. Now, there are certain task definition's that are supposedly available to Windows according to the documentation but turn out not to be. I'll list this here in the hopes that this could be cleared up by the ECS Fargate team.

1. ephemeralStorage - Here it's shown the ephemeralStorage is able to adjusted on Windows Fargate https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/fargate-task-storage.html and here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-properties-ecs-taskdefinition-ephemeralstorage.html, however in the API doc it says this is not available for Windows https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/task_definition_parameters.html

I believe that 1.0.0 does not actually support this as I've been trying to run a large unreal engine docker image (151gb uncompressed) and keep getting "CannotPullContainer: failed to extract layer" errors.

2. environmentFiles At these docs https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/taskdef-envfiles.html it is shown that the environmentFiles field should work for Windows 1.0.0 but whenever I try to include this field in my Windows task I get a PlatformTaskDefinitionIncompatibilityException which makes me suspect it is not actually implemented. You can follow this issue I made here #1626

I suspect there are probably more discrepancies between the documentation and the implementation for Windows Fargate, and I suspect not many people are running Windows containers on Fargate, but I do feel this should be rectified! I'll continue adding to this list if anything more comes up.

I'm going to attempt to instead run a cluster on an EC2 instance and hopefully the process will be a bit smoother.

[mreferre]

@tonetechnician thanks for investing your time in reporting this. I have sent a nudge to the team to look into this. FYI one other effective way to provide this feedback is on the doc page as well clicking on the feedback button. That opens a ticket that lands in the docs writers queue!

[tonetechnician]

Thanks for the feedback @mreferre ! I've also now used the feedback button to report the issue, as well as posted in Amazon re:post https://repost.aws/questions/QUSaqI1kkXRSetf-5uj6_svw/ecs-fargate-windows-documentation-unclear.

Hopefully it can be resolved soon! Ideally the features are made available rather than the documentation changing, hehe :)

[mreferre]

The latter is a lot easier than the former :)

Thanks for your work here.

[browndjaz]

Hi, Thanks for your feedback. We appreciated it.

We've made some updates to the documentation to get them synchronized.

The following pages were updated:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-properties-ecs-taskdefinition-ephemeralstorage.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/fargate-task-storage.html#fargate-task-storage-pvws1 Added a note that this is not supported for Windows containers on Fargate.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/taskdef-envfiles.html#taskdef-envfiles-considerations Added a paragraph saying to check that the variable is supported for the operating system,

Please let us knows if there is anything else that is not clear.

Thanks

[aws-Ninja]

On current public document on environmentFiles, I am still seeing it says environmentFiles somehow is supported for Fargate windows (1.0.0 or later) which was in-corrected.

I tested it in my account and got Platform not support issue.

For Amazon ECS tasks on AWS Fargate, your tasks must use platform version 1.4.0 or later (Linux) or 1.0.0 or later (Windows) to use this feature. For more information, see AWS Fargate platform versions.

Can we please take a look into this once?