Ever wish you could magically SSH into a running ECS Task to get hands on while debugging a Docker container running on AWS?

You can with AWS ECS Exec, you might have already known that.

Recently AWS released a new addition to the ECS GUI that allows you to EXEC your way into a task directly from the console.

Even if you would prefer to do your hackery from the command line rather than through the AWS console’s command line you can copy the connection command to save yourself the headache of remembering it and putting together a working one for that specific task.

As a bonus I updated my free open source Terraform scripts for spinning up an ECS service to have this functionality baked right in. Just set enable_execute_command to true.