Posted On: Nov 10, 2022
Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) has announced the availability of ECS task scale-in protection, a new feature that enables customers to protect long-running tasks from being terminated by scale-in events and deployments. This feature helps simplify orchestration of queue-processing asynchronous applications such as a video transcoding jobs wherein some tasks may be running for hours even when cumulative service utilization is low or when a new code version is being deployed while some tasks have not yet finished completing ongoing work that would be expensive to reprocess.
Amazon ECS has an inbuilt Service auto scaling feature that lets you set policies to adjust the desired count of tasks of an ECS service in response to changes in traffic patterns. This enables customers to build applications that are highly scalable for peak traffic conditions, and reduce compute costs during periods of low utilization. Customers have told us that certain applications require a mechanism to safeguard mission-critical tasks from termination by scale-in events during times of low utilization or during service deployments. Customers can now use a new Amazon ECS container agent endpoint or the new Amazon ECS UpdateTaskProtection API to protect tasks from termination by auto scaling and deployment events. With task scale-in protection, customers have a simplified mechanism for orchestrating their long-running applications with ECS, while also benefiting from the performance and cost-savings of service auto scaling, without needing to invest in custom tooling.
Amazon ECS task scale-in protection is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon ECS is available. To learn more, refer to task scale-in protection user guide and blog post.