Prepare for AWS Fargate task retirement on Amazon ECS - Amazon Elastic Container Service
Step 1: Set the task wait timeStep 2: Capture task retirement notifications to alert teams and take actionsStep 3: Control the replacement of tasks

Prepare for AWS Fargate task retirement on Amazon ECS

In order to prepare for task retirement, perform the following operations:

  1. Set the task retirement wait period.

  2. Capture task retirement notifications to notify team members.

  3. You can't control the exact timing of a task retirement, however, you can control the replacement of tasks by updating the service with the force-deployment option.

Step 1: Set the task wait time

You can configure the time that Fargate starts the task retirement. For workloads that require immediate application of the updates, choose the immediate setting (0). When you need more control, for example, when a task can only be stopped during a certain window, configure the 7 day (7), or 14 day (14) option.

We recommend that you choose a shorter waiting period in order to pick up newer platform versions revisions sooner.

Configure the wait period by running put-account-setting-default or put-account-setting as the root user or an administrative user. Use the fargateTaskRetirementWaitPeriod option for the name and the value option set to one of the following values:

  • 0 - AWS sends the notification, and immediately starts to retire the affected tasks.

  • 7 - AWS sends the notification, and waits 7 calendar days before starting to retire the affected tasks.

  • 14 - AWS sends the notification, and waits 14 calendar days before starting to retire the affected tasks.

The default is 7 days.

For more information, see, put-account-setting-default and put-account-setting in the Amazon Elastic Container Service API Reference.

Step 2: Capture task retirement notifications to alert teams and take actions

When there is an upcoming task retirement, AWS sends a task retirement notification to the AWS Health Dashboard, and to the primary email contact on the AWS account. The AWS Health Dashboard provides a number of integrations into other AWS services, including Amazon EventBridge. You can use EventBridge to build automations from a task retirement notification, such as increasing the visibility of the upcoming retirement by forwarding the message to a ChatOps tool. AWS Health Aware is a resource that shows the power of the AWS Health Dashboard and how notifications can be distributed throughout an organization. You can forward a task retirement notification to a chat application, such as Slack.

The following illustration shows the solution overview.

Diagram showing the Fargate solution to capture Fargate task retirement notices.

The following information provides details.

  • Fargate sends the task retirement notification to the AWS Health Dashboard.

  • The AWS Health Dashboard sends mail to the primary email contact on the AWS account, and notifies EventBridge.

  • EventBridge has a rule that captures the retirement notification.

    The rule looking for events with the Event Detail Type: "AWS Health Event" and the Event Detail Type Code: "AWS_ECS_TASK_PATCHING_RETIREMENT"

  • The rule triggers a Lambda function that forwards the information to Slack using a Slack Incoming Webhook. For more information, see Incoming Webhooks.

For a code example, see Capturing AWS Fargate Task Retirement Notifications on Github.

Step 3: Control the replacement of tasks

You can't control the exact timing of a task retirement, however, you can define a wait time. If you want control over replacing tasks at your own schedule, you can capture the task retirement notice to first understand the task retirement date. You can then redeploy your service to launch replacement tasks, and likewise replace any standalone tasks.For services that use rolling deployment, you update the service using update-service with the force-deployment option before the retirement start time.

The following update-service example uses the force-deployment option.

aws ecs update-service —-service service_name \ 
    --cluster cluster_name \
     --force-new-deployment

For services that use the blue/green deployment, you need to create a new deployment in AWS CodeDeploy. For information about how to create the deployment, see create-deployment in the AWS Command Line Interface Reference.