Adding tags to an Amazon EC2 container instance for Amazon ECS

Method 1 – When creating the container instance using the Amazon EC2 API, CLI, or console, specify tags by passing user data to the instance using the container agent configuration parameter ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS. This creates tags that are associated with the container instance in Amazon ECS only, they cannot be listed using the Amazon EC2 API. For more information, see Bootstrapping Amazon ECS Linux container instances to pass data.

The following is an example of a user data script that associates tags with your container instance:

#!/bin/bash
cat <<'EOF' >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config
ECS_CLUSTER=MyCluster
ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS={"tag_key": "tag_value"}
EOF

Method 2 – When you create your container instance using the Amazon EC2 API, CLI, or console, first specify tags using the TagSpecification.N parameter. Then, pass user data to the instance by using the container agent configuration parameter ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM. Doing so propagates them from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS.

The following is an example of a user data script that propagates the tags that are associated with an Amazon EC2 instance, and registers the instance with a cluster that's named MyCluster.

#!/bin/bash
cat <<'EOF' >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config
ECS_CLUSTER=MyCluster
ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM=ec2_instance
EOF

To provide access to allow container instance tags to propagate from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS, manually add the following permissions as an inline policy to the Amazon ECS container instance IAM role. For more information, see Adding and Removing IAM Policies.

The following is an example policy that's used to add these permissions.