Amazon ECS introduces pause and continue controls for service deployments
Amazon ECS now allows users to pause and continue service deployments, providing greater control and flexibility during deployment processes. This new feature supports various deployment strategies and is available in all AWS regions.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) has introduced a new feature allowing users to pause service deployments at key stages, offering greater control over deployment processes. This capability is designed to provide manual intervention points, facilitating scenarios such as manual approval workflows, operational checks, integration tests, or custom automation, while still utilizing Amazon ECS’s native deployment strategies. These strategies include managed traffic shifting, bake times, fast rollbacks, CloudWatch alarms, and deployment circuit breakers.
The new feature allows users to configure a PAUSE deployment lifecycle hook within their Amazon ECS service deployment setup. When a deployment encounters a pre-configured pause point, the system halts progression and triggers Amazon EventBridge events. These events can activate automation workflows, approval systems, or external validation processes. Users have the option to either continue or roll back the deployment using the newly introduced ContinueServiceDeployment API. The pause hooks can be configured with timeout durations of up to 14 days, and users can set timeout actions to automatically continue or revert the deployment if no action is taken within the specified period.
This enhancement supports multiple deployment strategies, including rolling, blue/green, linear, and canary, and can be configured through various platforms such as the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Terraform. The ContinueServiceDeployment API is accessible via the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs. This new feature is available across all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For more detailed information, users are encouraged to consult the documentation on pause hooks and continuing service deployments.