What Do I Need for a Successful ECS Deployment?

Before anything, have you checked why your service is unhealthy? It could be an issue with the health checks failing either on your image or load balancer. Take a look at your logs for more clues! Sharing more details could help.

Make sure to check the path used by your load balancer for health checks (like /api/health). Also, if all your containers aren’t in good health, the task might not have started up correctly. Run the task independently first to pinpoint issues—sometimes, that can clarify what's wrong without the service layer complicating things.

Are you using EC2 or Fargate? Fargate simplifies a lot of the setup for you, so depending on your choice, that could change what you need to configure.

When a service is marked unhealthy, it might mean your LoadBalancer can't reach it, not necessarily that the service isn't running. Double-check your security group's settings to ensure the right ports are open. Most of the time, the issue boils down to that.

Sounds like a startup issue. AWS logs can be tricky to navigate, but they often link from the startup failure status page. If you can, test your containers locally using Docker Compose. It helps catch issues early, especially with dependencies like databases! Here's a sample project you could check out: https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example

It’s important to consider whether your compute service is too tied to your database's health. It can be advantageous to have separate health checks for your compute layer and persistence layer. Also, if you're worried about both failing simultaneously, using CloudWatch Composite Alarms could help you monitor both effectively!