The ecsspawner (also known as JupyterHub ECS/AWS Spawner) enables JupyterHub to spawn single-user notebook servers on a ECS cluster in AWS.

Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service which allows us to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS.

Jupyter Notebooks are instantiated using ECS Tasks. A Task is the mechanism offered by Amazon ECS to encapsulate containers allowing us to specificy its charateristics using Task definitions.

A task definition includes:

• The Docker image to use
• CPU and memory requirements
• AWS Network, logging, volumens and IAM roles
• Launch types: EC2 or Fargate. Read more about

When using EC2 launch type, we have some alternatives for starting ECS tasks:

1. Let Amazon ECS to run the Task based on the task definition using the current cluster capacity.
2. Create a EC2 instance on the cluster, and start the ECS task on the created EC2 instance.
3. Combined: Let amazon to run the task (1) and as a fallback scenario use (2) when no cluster capacity is available.

## Spawner Configuration

c.JupyterHub.spawner_class = 'awsspawner.EcsTaskSpawner'

strategy: Defines the spawning mechanism to be used. Possible values are

• ECSSpawnerHandler: Let Amazon ECS to run the Task based on the task definition
• ECSxEC2SpawnerHandler: Create a EC2 instance on the cluster, and start the ECS task on the created EC2 instance

cluster_name: ECS cluster name.

ecs_task_definition: When using ECS spawning mechanim, a task definition string is mandatory. The task definition must point to a definition where a Jupyter notebook is specified.

ec2_instance_template: When using EC2/ECSxEC2 mechanism, an AWS ECS instance template is required to determine EC2 instantiation.

c.Spawner.strategy = 'ECSxEC2SpawnerHandler'
c.Spawner.strategy_parms = {
    'cluster_name': 'notebook-cluster',
    'ec2_instance_template': 'ec2-demo-template',
    'ecs_task_definition': 'jupyter-notebook-template',
    'port': 8888
}