Amazon ECS announces Managed Daemons for ECS Managed Instances

Amazon ECS announces Managed Daemons for ECS Managed Instances, enabling organizations to centrally deploy and manage software agents such as security, observability, and networking across their container infrastructure independent of application deployments. By decoupling daemon lifecycle management from application operations, Managed Daemons helps guarantee reliable agent coverage across all workloads, simplifies deployments and version updates, and improves resource utilization by running a single daemon task per managed instance.

With Managed Daemons, you can create a daemon for one or more Managed Instances capacity providers in your cluster. ECS places exactly one daemon task per managed instance and guarantees that daemons are running before any application tasks are placed, so cross-cutting functions such as logging, tracing, and metrics collection are always available. ECS orchestrates daemons as independent processes bound to the instance lifecycle rather than individual application tasks, allowing platform administrators to manage them independently from application teams. When you update daemon versions, ECS drains existing instances and provisions new instances with the updated daemon, automatically replacing service tasks with circuit breaker protection and rollback capabilities for reliable coverage across all your workloads.

To get started, you can use AWS Console, CLI, CloudFormation, or AWS SDKs to register a daemon task definition specifying your container image, then create a daemon with associated capacity providers in your clusters. This feature is now available in all AWS Regions. For more details, refer to our documentation and launch blog post. There is no additional cost - you pay only for the standard compute resources consumed by your daemon tasks.