Intra container connections

[hamiltop]

Clustered applications would require direct connections between containers. At a minimum, this would require connecting directly to a container without going through the ALB. Ideally we'd have service discovery available so open ports and associated containers for a given app can be queried.

[ejholmes]

I think service discovery would be pretty cool to support. This is entirely possible by using the DescribeTasks api. It'll return information about the containers, including host port.

We'd probably need to expose some env variables to the container (e.g. ECS_CLUSTER, ECS_SERVICE) as well as add some IAM policies to allow hitting the ListTasks/DescribeTasks api. We'd also probably want a flag in the extended procfile to disable attaching a load balancer.