ECS Fargate application container cannot establish connection with Postgres database container - postgresql

Question

I am trying to use ecs-cli to push a two container docker compose file up to FARGATE ECS. This is for a preview environment only. The first container is postgres:12 and the second is hasura/graphql-engine:v1.3.3
The docker-compose.yml looks like the following
version: '3'
services:
postgres:
image: postgres:12
ports:
- "5432:5432"
restart: always
volumes:
- db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
environment:
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgrespassword
logging:
driver: awslogs
options:
awslogs-group: tutorial
awslogs-region: us-east-1
awslogs-stream-prefix: postgres
graphql-engine:
image: hasura/graphql-engine:v1.3.3
ports:
- "80:80"
depends_on:
- "postgres"
restart: always
environment:
HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://postgres:postgrespassword#127.0.0.1:5432/postgres
## enable the console served by server
HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: "true" # set to "false" to disable console
## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production
HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: "true"
HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log
## uncomment next line to set an admin secret
# HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: myadminsecretkey
logging:
driver: awslogs
options:
awslogs-group: tutorial
awslogs-region: us-east-1
awslogs-stream-prefix: hasura
volumes:
db_data:
The ecs-params.yml looks like the following
version: 1
task_definition:
ecs_network_mode: awsvpc
task_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::***:role/ecsTaskExecutionRole"
task_execution_role: "arn:aws:iam::***:role/ecsTaskExecutionRole"
task_size:
cpu_limit: "256"
mem_limit: "512"
run_params:
network_configuration:
awsvpc_configuration:
subnets:
- "subnet-***"
- "subnet-***"
security_groups:
- "sg-***"
assign_public_ip: "ENABLED"
I am using the following command line call to trigger the push
ecs-cli compose --file docker-compose.yml --ecs-params ecs-params.yml --debug service up --deployment-max-percent 100 --deployment-min-healthy-percent 0 --region us-east-1 --cluster "{ARN CLUSTER VALUE}" --create-log-groups --launch-type "FARGATE"
In ECS I can see the new service created and its 1 Fargate task is spinning up. If I open the task, the containers move from PENDING -> RUNNING. After some time, the application container moves to STOPPED and then eventually the database container moves to STOPPED as well. Once this happens the task stops and a new task goes through the same cycle.
Here is the log for the application container
Here is the log for the database container
In the docker-compose I have tried changing the environment variable for the PG database connection string to both postgres://postgres:postgrespassword#127.0.0.1:5432/postgres and postgres://postgres:postgrespassword#localhost:5432/postgres, both result in the same issue.
Any idea what might be going on here? This is inspired from this article: https://dev.to/raphaelmansuy/10-minutes-to-deploy-a-docker-compose-stack-on-aws-illustrated-with-hasura-and-postgres-3f6e
The only difference is that article uses EC2, not Fargate.

Answer 1

try and add
links:
- postgres
to your graphql-engine service instead of depends_on which doesn't seem to work with AWS ECS.