Amazon ECS announces the general availability of ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announced the general availability of Amazon ECS deployment circuit breaker, for EC2 and Fargate launch types. With this feature, Amazon ECS customers using the ECS Rolling update deployment type can automatically roll back unhealthy service deployments without the need for manual intervention. This empowers customers to quickly discover failed deployments, without worrying about resources being consumed for failing tasks, or indefinite deployment delays.

There are several reasons why a deployment can be unhealthy, some of which include a breaking change introduced to the code, service configuration or misconfigured health checks. Deployment circuit breaker monitors deployments for recurring task launch failures which can indicate that the deployment will not reach steady state. It automatically identifies and terminates deployments that meet the failure criteria based on the number of failed task launches that do not reach healthy RUNNING state. Also, It includes the capability to automatically roll back deployments. When enabled, Amazon ECS will also automatically roll back a failed deployment to the previous healthy version of the service, while respecting the deployment configuration defined by the customer. Amazon ECS will also surface the status of the deployment as part of the service APIs through a new parameter called rollOutState and new Amazon ECS service events.

Customers can enable ECS deployment circuit breaker at the time of creating or updating the service as part of the deployment configuration of the ECS service via the AWS CLI, CloudFormation, AWS SDK. This feature is now generally available across all AWS regions.

To learn more about this feature, view our documentation and the AWS containers blog post.