My scanning agents keep starting up and immediately shutting down

The main reason we see this happening is the agent does not have a route (outbound over internet or through VPC Endpoint) path to Amazon ECR.

This scenario is where the Fargate Service Task cannot reach out to the ECR to get the task image itself to properly load it. What you'll find here is you'll get the following message:

STOPPED (ResourceInitializationError: unable to pull secrets or registry auth: execution resource retrieval failed: unable to retrieve ecr registry auth: service call has been retried 1 time(s): RequestError: send request failed caused by: Post https://api.ecr....)

The agent service just needs to gain access to the ECR. There are two main ways to accomplish this:

  • Ensure your VPC is attached to an Internet Gateway with outbound access

  • Leverage VPC Endpoints to get you to ECR and API calls internally through AWS' network

Both the console and the scanning agents can run in private subnets and do not require public IPs as long as they can communicate outbound and you can still get to the console.

Don't forget about Security Groups. We have seen customers be tricked (really just forgotten about the rules they had in place) on gaining access to the console because of the SG that was in place.

Security Groups can also have outbound restrictions. By default they are wide open, but that does not mean yours are. If the steps above do not fix this issue, double check your Security Group settings (outbound rules).

If taking these steps does not resolve the problem, please Contact Us. We are here to help!

Last updated