How to add EC2 instance to ECS cluster using AWS Node SDK

Question

I am trying to programmaticly create a ECS cluster with EC2 instance in it. As far as I understand I should first create an ECS cluster , than EC2 instance and then register instance using this method :

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/latest/AWS/ECS.html#registerContainerInstance-property

Is it how I should do it? Which arguments are mandatory? How to get instanceIdentityDocument and instanceIdentityDocumentSignature?

thanks

Answer 1

I would use the User Data of the EC2 instance to launch the instance directly into the ECS cluster. This is the User Data you'll want to use:

#!/bin/bash
echo ECS_CLUSTER=your_cluster_name >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config

The details of this are described in the AWS docs. You can also use this user data in an Auto Scale Group Launch Configuration.

Apart from that, it might be worth it to look into languages that where made to provision infrastructure, like Terraform (also for AWS) or CloudFormation (specifically for AWS).