Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it now delivers application load balancing for containers.

The load balancing news comes as part of AWS’s move to make it easier for its customers to use containers. To do that, it’s in the process of integrating capabilities of its Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform into its ECS  — Amazon’s system that allows customers to run containerized applications.

“[Customers] told us that integrating the capabilities you get with the AWS platform, such as load balancing, scaling, security, monitoring, and more, with containers is a key requirement,” states an AWS corporate blog.

As of last week, ECS now supports an application load balancer that operates at the application layer and allows users to define content-based routing rules. The new application load balancer includes two features to simplify running microservices on ECS: dynamic ports and the ability for multiple services to share a single load balancer.

Dynamic ports make it easier to start tasks in a cluster without having to worry about port conflicts, according to the blog. Users can specify a dynamic port in the ECS task definition, which gives the container an unused port when it is scheduled on an EC2 instance.

In addition, previously, there was one-to-one mapping between ECS services and load balancers. Now, a load balancer can be shared with multiple services, using path-based routing, says the blog.

In July Amazon reported a third consecutive quarter of record profits, largely driven by AWS.