Chapter 11. Managing ECS Infrastructure Life Cycle
A fundamental ongoing activity associated with operating ECS infrastructure is the requirement to manage the life cycle of your ECS container instances. In any production-grade scenario, you will be required to patch your ECS container instances, and ensure the core components of your ECS container instances such as the Docker Engine and ECS agent are updated frequently to ensure you have access to the latest features, and security and performance enhancements. In an immutable infrastructure world where your ECS container instances are considered "cattle", the standard approach is that you destroy and replace your ECS container instances by rolling in new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), rather than taking the traditional approach of patching pets and keeping your ECS container instances around for a long period of time. Another common use case where you need to manage the life cycle is related to Auto Scaling—for example, if you scale your...