Docker containers generate logs, and Docker supports the docker logs and docker service logs commands to list logs. Docker also supports logging drivers, which are logging mechanisms to get logs generated by running containers and services.

Problem: Without a managed service, such as Amazon ECS, a logging driver must be configured if a logging mechanism is to be added.

Solution: With the Fargate launch type, logging is greatly simplified and the only supported logging driver is awslogs. The awslogs logging driver streams logs generated by ECS tasks to CloudWatch Logs. Using aws-logs-prefix, a label may be associated with the awslogs driver to differentiate between the log streams generated by the different tasks containers.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

• Overview of CloudWatch Logs and aws log driver
• Creating an ECS service for a MySQL database
• Configuring a Container definition
• Configuring logging
• Configuring a Task definition
• Configuring a service
• Configuring a cluster
• Creating an ECS service
• Exploring Task Logs
• Exploring CloudWatch Logs
• Exploring CloudWatch metrics

The only prerequisite is an AWS account.