title: AWS ECS: How do I get around "too many containers" with my microservice architecture API?
body: <p>I'm working on an API with microservice architecture. I deploy to ECS via Elastic Beanstalk. Each microservice is a long-running task (which, on ECS equates to a single container). I just passed up 10 tasks, and I can no longer deploy.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>ERROR: Service:AmazonECS, Code:ClientException, Message:Too many containers., Class:com.amazonaws.services.ecs.model.ClientException</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/service_limits.html" rel="nofollow">According to the documentation</a>, 10 task definition containers is a hard limit on ECS.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to get around this? How can I continue adding services to my API on ECS? This limitation suggests to me I am not using the service as intended. What is the best way to deploy a collection of microservices each as a separate Docker container on AWS?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> My understanding of the relationship between containers and tasks was completely wrong. Looks like the entire API is a single task and each container in my Dockerrun.aws.json is a container inside the API task. So, the limitation is a limit on containers inside a single task.</p>