ECS Fargate Ephemeral Storage Exhaustion

critical

Resource ContentionUpdated Feb 12, 2026

Fargate tasks crash with storage errors when the default 20GB ephemeral storage fills up. This manifests as repeated task restarts without resolution until storage is increased.

Sources

How to Configure Fargate Ephemeral Storageoneuptime.com

amazon web services - Are the units incorrect for Storage Read / Write graphs in AWS ECS Container Insights? - Server Faultserverfault.com

AWS ECS metrics | Vector documentationvector.dev

Ecs Fargate Memory And CPU - TechBloatwww.techbloat.com

Catch and remediate ECS issues faster with default monitors and the ECS Explorer | Datadogwww.datadoghq.com

Technologies:

DockerSymptoms of this issue are visible in Docker metrics and logs

Amazon ECSThe root cause of this issue originates in Amazon ECS

How to detect:

Monitor ephemeral storage usage approaching 85-90% of allocated capacity. Tasks will crash with storage errors and restart repeatedly. CloudWatch Container Insights shows StorageReadBytes and StorageWriteBytes as cumulative totals (not rates), making sustained high values indicate risk.

Recommended action:

Increase ephemeralStorage.sizeInGiB in task definition (21-200 GB range). Set CloudWatch alarms at 85% usage threshold. Implement application-level cleanup of temporary files. Monitor actual usage patterns to right-size allocation with 20-30% headroom.