Announcing managed daemon support for Amazon ECS Managed Instances | Amazon Web Services (opens in new tab)
Amazon ECS Managed Daemons let platform teams independently deploy and maintain monitoring, logging, and tracing agents across ECS Managed Instances. This decouples operational tooling from application task definitions, reducing coordination and redeployment work. ECS ensures daemons are available before applications start and maintains coverage during rolling updates. ## Decoupled Daemon Management - Platform teams can centrally deploy and update agents without changing application services or rebuilding AMIs. - Daemons can target multiple or specific capacity providers. - Each instance runs exactly one daemon copy shared by its application tasks. - CPU and memory settings are managed separately from application configurations. - Daemons start before application tasks and are drained after them. ## Deployment and Updates - Daemon task definitions are created separately in the ECS console. - A daemon can be associated with a cluster and an ECS Managed Instances capacity provider. - ECS automatically launches the daemon on every applicable instance. - Rolling updates use a “start before stop” process: - New instances launch with the updated daemon. - The daemon starts before application tasks migrate. - Old instances are terminated afterward. - Configurable drain percentages control replacement speed, while automatic rollback improves update safety. ## Technical Capabilities - Managed daemons use a dedicated `daemon_bridge` network mode to communicate with application tasks while remaining isolated from application networking. - They support privileged containers, additional Linux capabilities, and host filesystem mounts. - These features enable host-level monitoring of metrics, processes, and system calls. - ECS validates and manages daemon-specific task definitions independently from standard application tasks. ## Availability and Cost - Managed daemon support is available in all AWS Regions. - There is no additional managed-daemon fee; users pay only for the compute resources consumed by daemon tasks. - The feature can be configured through the ECS console, APIs, and documentation. For organizations running many ECS services, managed daemons provide a simpler and more reliable way to operate shared infrastructure agents without involving application teams in every update.