I've been having a really frustrating day trying to get my ECS task to pull from Amazon ECR. Here's my setup: I've got a container definition within a task definition, which is part of a service definition. I've also configured an ECS cluster and a VPC with three subnets across different AZs, along with a private endpoint to ECR and a security group that should theoretically allow everything to communicate. I've set up a task execution role with permissions for ECR and CloudWatch Logs.
Despite all this, ECS just isn't pulling the task from ECR, and I can't figure out why. I tried following the SSM runbook "TroubleshootECSTaskFailedToStart," but it only completed four out of twelve steps and didn't provide any actionable output.
I eventually got an error:
Task stopped at: 2026-02-08T00:42:44.811Z
`ResourceInitializationError: unable to pull secrets or registry auth: The task cannot pull registry auth from Amazon ECR: There is a connection issue between the task and Amazon ECR. Check your task network configuration.` It seems like there's a timeout while trying to connect to ECR. I'm wondering if I might have configured my ECR interface endpoint incorrectly. Does anyone have a Terraform example that illustrates the whole process of creating an ECS service from start to finish? Also, what could be causing ECS to fail when trying to connect to RDS? This situation is getting quite tiresome with AWS.
2 Answers
One thing that tripped me up was forgetting to set up the VPC Gateway endpoint for S3, which is essential since ECR relies on S3 for backing storage. Just make sure you've got that set up in addition to your ECR configuration. Also, sharing your Terraform setup might help others spot something that’s been overlooked!
I had a similar experience recently. Make sure you include the `com.amazonaws.us-west-2.ecr.api` endpoint along with your current setup. Without this API endpoint, your task can time out trying to access public ECR IPs from a private subnet. Also, check your security group settings to ensure that inbound traffic is allowed on port 443 from your task's CIDR.
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