<p>I have a docker file and using that i have build the image and then used EKS service to launch the containers. Now in my application for logging purpose I am taking environment variables like "container_instance" and "ec2_instance_id" and logging it so that I can see in Elastic Search from which container or host ec2 machine this log got generated.</p>

<p>How can I set these 2 data when I start my container in environment variable?</p>

Naggappan Ramukannan
<p>In your Kubernetes Pod spec, you can use the <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/inject-data-application/environment-variable-expose-pod-information/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">downward API</a> to inject some of this information.  For example, to get the node's Kubernetes node name, you can set</p>

<pre><code>env:
  - name: MY_NODE_NAME
    valueFrom:
      fieldRef:
        fieldPath: spec.nodeName
</code></pre>

<p>The node name is typically a hostname for the node (<a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/launch-workers.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this example in the EKS docs</a> shows the EC2 internal hostnames, for example).  You can't easily get things like an EC2 instance ID at a per-pod level.</p>

<p>You also might configure logging globally at a cluster level.  The Kubernetes documentation includes <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/logging-elasticsearch-kibana/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a packaged setup to route logs to Elasticsearch and Kibana</a>.  The example shown there includes only the pod name in the log message metadata, but you should be able to reconfigure the underlying <a href="https://fluentd.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">fluentd</a> to include additional host-level metadata.</p>
