I suspected that this was a java dependency tree issue and bounced the idea off of some my coworkers. Further analysis identified that our old ant build was packaging multiple versions of the same jar in the application deployment .war file causing a classic library collision issue.

So we decided to drop the old ant build process and use Maven. After building out a Maven pom file to support our legacy application we were able to build and deploy a new image to AWS and the issue went away. I have seen class path issues like this in the past when running the same java application in windows and linux before, but expected a containerized deployment to mitigate the possibility of this occurring. Boy was I wrong.