Amazon ECS Introduces Enhanced Container Dependency Management

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces additional task definition parameters that enable you to define dependencies for container startup and shutdown as well as a per-container start and stop timeout value.

Previously there was no way to ensure that containers start up or shut down in any particular order. Now, a number of common application use cases are enabled. For example, a telemetry sidecar container that must start before and shut down after the other containers in a task, or an initialization container that must complete its work before other containers in the task can start. Additionally, the startup and shutdown timeouts for containers previously was set through an environment variable in the ECS agent. Now, containers in a task definition can each have their own startup and shutdown timeouts. This enables new capabilities such as an extended stop timeout for a container that must do complex cleanup operations before it shuts down, without requiring all containers on the same instance to have the same shutdown timeout.

To learn more about container dependency management and container timeout parameters, read our documentation.