Amazon ECS adds Network Load Balancer support for Linear and Canary deployments

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announces native support for linear and canary deployment strategies for ECS services using Network Load Balancers (NLB). Now, applications that commonly use NLB, such as those requiring TCP/UDP-based connections, low latency, long-lived connections, or static IP addresses, can take advantage of managed, incremental traffic shifting natively from ECS when rolling out updates.

With this launch, ECS customers using NLB can shift traffic in a controlled manner during deployments, such as moving traffic in increments or starting with a small percentage to validate changes before completing a rollout. These deployment strategies provide additional confidence during updates by allowing teams to observe application behavior at each traffic-shift step, and integrate with Amazon CloudWatch alarms to automatically stop or roll back deployments if issues are detected. This is especially valuable for workloads running behind an NLB, such as online gaming backends, financial transaction systems, and real-time messaging services.

To get started, select your NLB target groups, listener, and preferred deployment strategy in the ECS service configuration using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or Infrastructure-as-Code tools. This can be enabled for both new and existing ECS services in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For more information, see the documentation for Amazon ECS linear deployments and Amazon ECS canary deployments.