Restarting an ECS service

How to restart an ECS service when you change its configuration.

When you update a service’s configuration in S3 you’ll need to manually restart it to pick up the file changes. Because we do rolling ECS updates, you can do this without dropping traffic.

Prerequisites

You will need to have an AWS Console account.

Steps

First, visit the ECS page on AWS and choose your cluster (AppsStaging or AppsProd).

Clusters page in the ECS section of the AWS web console

Then, click the checkbox next to the service you want to restart and press the Update button.

Choosing a service and clicking “Update”

Don’t touch any other settings, but make sure to click the Force new deployment checkbox. That will start up new containers, even though the code hasn’t changed from what’s currently running.

Choose “Force new deployment” on the update page

Click Next step through all of the screens, and then click Update service.

Navigate to the service’s “Events” tab and keep an eye on things. You should see it start new tasks and eventually deregister and stop the old tasks. Once it says “…has reached a steady state” again then you know things were successful.

Events as the deployment is underway.