Amazon ECS introduces pause and continue controls for service deployments
Amazon ECS now offers the ability to pause and continue service deployments, providing greater control and flexibility during critical stages. This feature supports manual interventions while maintaining native deployment strategies.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) has introduced a new feature that allows users to pause service deployments at critical stages and resume them when ready. This enhancement offers flexibility by enabling manual decision points and interactive controls during deployments. Such controls are beneficial for scenarios requiring manual approval workflows, operational checks, integration tests, or custom automation. Despite these manual interventions, users can still utilize Amazon ECS’s native deployment strategies, which include managed traffic shifting, bake times, fast rollbacks, CloudWatch alarms, and deployment circuit breakers.
The new feature includes a PAUSE deployment lifecycle hook that can be configured as part of the Amazon ECS service deployment setup. When a deployment reaches a designated pause point, it halts and triggers Amazon EventBridge events. These events can initiate automation workflows, approval systems, or external validation processes. Users can then decide to proceed or roll back the deployment using the newly introduced ContinueServiceDeployment API. The pause hooks offer flexibility with timeout durations of up to 14 days, and users can set actions to automatically continue or roll back the deployment if no response is received.
This feature supports various deployment strategies, including rolling, blue/green, linear, and canary. Users can configure pause hooks using the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Terraform. The ContinueServiceDeployment API is accessible through the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs. This functionality is available across all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For further details, users are encouraged to consult the documentation on pause hooks for service deployments and the process for continuing service deployments.