Amazon ECS Task Lifecycle
by Jessica Deen
When a task is started, either manually or as part of a service, it can pass through several states before it finishes on its own or is stopped manually. Some tasks are meant to run as batch jobs that naturally progress through from PENDING to RUNNING to STOPPED. Other tasks, which can be part of a service, are meant to continue running indefinitely, or to be scaled up and down as needed.
When task status changes are requested, such as stopping a task or updating the desired count of a service to scale it up or down, the Amazon ECS container agent tracks these changes as the last known status (lastStatus) of the task and the desired status (desiredStatus) of the task. Both the last known status and desired status of a task can be seen either in the console or by describing the task with the API or AWS CLI.
This visual flow chart shows the task lifecycle flow.
