Inspecting the local Docker environment

As you might expect, your ECS container instance will have an active Docker Engine running, which you can gather information about by running the docker info command:

> docker info
Containers: 1
 Running: 1
 Paused: 0
 Stopped: 0
Images: 2
Server Version: 17.09.1-ce
Storage Driver: devicemapper
 Pool Name: docker-docker--pool
 Pool Blocksize: 524.3kB
 Base Device Size: 10.74GB
 Backing Filesystem: ext4
...
...

Here you can see the instance is running Docker version 17.09.1-ce, using the device mapper storage driver, and currently has a single container running.

Let's now take a look at the running container by executing the docker container ps command:

> docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                            COMMAND    CREATED          STATUS          NAMES
a1b1a89b5e9e   amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest   "/agent"   36 minutes ago   Up 36 minutes   ecs-agent

You can see that the ECS agent actually runs as a container called ecs-agent, which should always be running on your ECS container instances in order for your ECS container instance to be managed by ECS.