Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables you to pause service deployments at critical stages during deployment progression and continue deployments when ready. You can use these pause points to introduce manual decision points and interactive controls into your deployments for scenarios such as manual approval workflows, operational checks, integration tests, or custom automation, while continuing to use native Amazon ECS deployment strategies with managed traffic shifting, bake times, fast rollbacks, CloudWatch alarms, and deployment circuit breaker.

With this launch, you can configure a new PAUSE deployment lifecycle hook as part of your Amazon ECS service deployment configuration. When a deployment reaches a configured pause point, Amazon ECS pauses deployment progression and emits Amazon EventBridge events that you can use to trigger automation workflows, approval systems, or external validation processes. You can then continue or roll back the deployment using the new ContinueServiceDeployment API. With pause hooks, you can configure timeout durations up to 14 days and timeout actions to automatically continue or roll back the deployment if no action is received.

You can configure pause hooks for rolling, blue/green, linear, and canary deployment strategies using the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Terraform. You can use the ContinueServiceDeployment API through the Amazon ECS Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs. This feature is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, see our documentation on pause hooks for service deployments and continuing service deployments.