Posted On: Nov 26, 2021

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Amazon ECS Exec for workloads running on Windows operating systems. Amazon ECS Exec, launched in March 2021, makes it easier for customers to troubleshoot errors, collect diagnostic information, interact with processes in containers during development, or get “break-glass” access to containers to debug critical issues encountered in production.

Customers running Windows-based containerized applications often need to run commands on a subset of containers. Today, they do this by logging in to the Amazon ECS instance the container is running on, which can raise concerns related to audit, access control, and batch processing, among others. Amazon ECS Exec gives customers interactive shell or single command access to a running container making it easier to debug issues, diagnose errors, collect one-off dumps and statistics, and interact with processes in the container.

This feature is supported on Amazon ECS optimized Windows AMIs (2019 and onwards) running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance with Network Address Translation (NAT) and task networking. Visit our documentation page or read more in the blog post about implementing commands in a running Windows container using Amazon ECS Exec from API, Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface (CLI) or Amazon Web Services SDKs. This feature is now available in all public Amazon Web Services Regions, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.