Docker for AWS Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Stable and beta channels

Two different download channels are available for Docker for AWS:

The stable channel provides a general availability release-ready deployment for a fully baked and tested, more reliable cluster. The stable version of Docker for AWS comes with the latest released version of Docker Engine. The release schedule is synched with Docker Engine releases and hotfixes. On the stable channel, you can select whether to send usage statistics and other data.
The beta channel provides a deployment with new features we are working on, but is not necessarily fully tested. It comes with the experimental version of Docker Engine. Bugs, crashes and issues are more likely to occur with the beta cluster, but you get a chance to preview new functionality, experiment, and provide feedback as the deployment evolve. Releases are typically more frequent than for stable, often one or more per month. Usage statistics and crash reports are sent by default. You do not have the option to disable this on the beta channel.

Can I use my own AMI?

No, at this time we only support the default Docker for AWS AMI.

How can I use Docker for AWS with an AWS account in an EC2-Classic region?

If you have an AWS account that was created before December 4th, 2013 you have what is known as an EC2-Classic account on regions where you have previously deployed resources. EC2-Classic accounts don’t have default VPC’s or the associated subnets, etc. This causes a problem when using our CloudFormation template because we are using the Fn:GetAZs function they provide to determine which availability zones you have access too. When used in a region where you have EC2-Classic, this function will return all availability zones for a region, even ones you don’t have access too. When you have an EC2-VPC account, it will return only the availability zones you have access to.

This will cause an error like the following:

“Value (us-east-1a) for parameter availabilityZone is invalid. Subnets can currently only be created in the following availability zones: us-east-1d, us-east-1c, us-east-1b, us-east-1e.”

If you have an EC2-Classic account, and you don’t have access to the a and b availability zones for that region.

There isn’t anything we can do right now to fix this issue, we have contacted Amazon, and we are hoping they will be able to provide us with a way to determine if an account is either EC2-Classic or EC2-VPC, so we can act accordingly.

How to tell if you are in the EC2-Classic region.

This AWS documentation page will describe how you can tell if you have EC2-Classic, EC2-VPC or both. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-supported-platforms.html

Possible fixes to the EC2-Classic region issue:

There are a few work arounds that you can try to get Docker for AWS up and running for you.

Use a region that doesn’t have EC2-Classic. The most common region with this issue is us-east-1. So try another region, us-west-1, us-west-2, or the new us-east-2. These regions will more then likely be setup with EC2-VPC and you will not longer have this issue.
Create an new AWS account, all new accounts will be setup using EC2-VPC and will not have this problem.
You can try and contact AWS support to convert your EC2-Classic account to a EC2-VPC account. For more information checkout the following answer for “Q. I really want a default VPC for my existing EC2 account. Is that possible?” on https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#Default_VPCs

Helpful links:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/default-vpc.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-supported-platforms.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-vpc.html
https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#Default_VPCs
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-update-virtual-private-clouds-for-everyone/

Can I use my existing VPC?

Not at this time, but it is on our roadmap for future releases.

Which AWS regions will this work with?

Docker for AWS should work with all regions except for AWS China, which is a little different than the other regions.

How many Availability Zones does Docker for AWS use?

All of Amazons regions have at least 2 AZ’s, and some have more. To make sure Docker for AWS works in all regions, only 2 AZ’s are used even if more are available.

What do I do if I get `KeyPair error` on AWS?

As part of the prerequisites, you need to have an SSH key uploaded to the AWS region you are trying to deploy to. For more information about adding an SSH key pair to your account, please refer to the Amazon EC2 Key Pairs docs

Where are my container logs?

All container logs are aggregated within AWS CloudWatch.

Where do I report problems or bugs?

Send an email to docker-for-iaas@docker.com or post to the Docker for AWS GitHub repositories.

In AWS, if your stack is misbehaving, please run the following diagnostic tool from one of the managers - this will collect your docker logs and send them to Docker:

$ docker-diagnose
OK hostname=manager1
OK hostname=worker1
OK hostname=worker2
Done requesting diagnostics.
Your diagnostics session ID is 1234567890-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Please provide this session ID to the maintainer debugging your issue.

Note: Your output will be slightly different from the above, depending on your swarm configuration.

Metrics

Docker for AWS sends anonymized minimal metrics to Docker (heartbeat). These metrics are used to monitor adoption and are critical to improve Docker for AWS.

How do I run administrative commands?

By default when you SSH into a manager, you will be logged in as the regular username: docker - It is possible however to run commands with elevated privileges by using sudo. For example to ping one of the nodes, after finding its IP via the Azure/AWS portal (e.g. 10.0.0.4), you could run:

$ sudo ping 10.0.0.4

Note: Access to Docker for AWS and Azure happens through a shell container that itself runs on Docker.

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