Amazon ECS adds pause and continue features to service deployments

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 necessary. This feature is designed to provide more control over the deployment process by incorporating manual decision points and interactive controls. These can be useful for scenarios that require manual approval workflows, operational checks, integration testing, or custom automation. Despite these additions, users can still utilize native Amazon ECS deployment strategies, including managed traffic shifting, bake times, quick rollbacks, CloudWatch alarms, and deployment circuit breakers.

As part of this update, users can now include a PAUSE deployment lifecycle hook in their Amazon ECS service deployment configuration. When a deployment reaches a specified pause point, Amazon ECS will halt the deployment progression and generate Amazon EventBridge events. These events can trigger automation workflows, approval systems, or external validation processes. Users can then decide to 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 proceed or revert the deployment if no action is taken within the specified time.

The pause hooks can be configured for various deployment strategies, including rolling, blue/green, linear, and canary deployments, through 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 regions as well as AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For further details, users can refer to the documentation on pause hooks for service deployments and continuing service deployments.