Improving operational visibility with AWS Fargate task retirement notifications

Introduction

AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containerized workloads, removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing and patching the underlying infrastructure. In this blog post we dive into AWS Fargate task retirement, one of the ways AWS keeps the infrastructure secure and up to date.

AWS has recently updated the AWS Fargate task retirement process, consolidating the notifications customers receive about upcoming retirements, and rolling out a mechanism to allow customers to control the time between a notification and a task retirement. In this post, we will explore these changes in more detail and provide an example of how to use these notifications to achieve operational excellence.

Background

When deploying an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task on to AWS Fargate, a platform version is specified in the Amazon ECS service or standalone task API call. A platform version refers to the runtime environment of the host operating system, a …