Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Handling Amazon ECS events

Amazon ECS sends events on an at least once basis. This means you might receive multiple copies of a given event. Additionally, events may not be delivered to your event listeners in the order in which the events occurred.

To order of events properly, the detail section of each event contains a version property. Each time a resource changes state, this version is incremented. Duplicate events have the same version in the detail object. If you are replicating your Amazon ECS container instance and task state with EventBridge, you can compare the version of a resource reported by the Amazon ECS APIs with the version reported in EventBridge for the resource to verify that the version in your event stream is current. Events with a higher version property number should be treated as occurring later than events with lower version numbers.

Example: Handling events in an Amazon Lambda function

The following example shows a Lambda function written in Python 3.9 that captures both task and container instance state change events and saves them to one of two Amazon DynamoDB tables:

import json
import boto3

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    id_name = ""
    new_record = {}

    # For debugging so you can see raw event format.
    print('Here is the event:')
    print((json.dumps(event)))

    if event["source"] != "aws.ecs":
       raise ValueError("Function only supports input from events with a source type of: aws.ecs")

    # Switch on task/container events.
    table_name = ""
    if event["detail-type"] == "ECS Task State Change":
        table_name = "ECSTaskState"
        id_name = "taskArn"
        event_id = event["detail"]["taskArn"]
    elif event["detail-type"] == "ECS Container Instance State Change":
        table_name = "ECSCtrInstanceState"
        id_name =  "containerInstanceArn"
        event_id = event["detail"]["containerInstanceArn"]
    else:
        raise ValueError("detail-type for event is not a supported type. Exiting without saving event.")

    new_record["cw_version"] = event["version"]
    new_record.update(event["detail"])

    # "status" is a reserved word in DDB, but it appears in containerPort
    # state change messages.
    if "status" in event:
        new_record["current_status"] = event["status"]
        new_record.pop("status")


    # Look first to see if you have received a newer version of an event ID.
    # If the version is OLDER than what you have on file, do not process it.
    # Otherwise, update the associated record with this latest information.
    print("Looking for recent event with same ID...")
    dynamodb = boto3.resource("dynamodb", region_name="us-east-1")
    table = dynamodb.Table(table_name)
    saved_event = table.get_item(
        Key={
            id_name : event_id
        }
    )
    if "Item" in saved_event:
        # Compare events and reconcile.
        print(("EXISTING EVENT DETECTED: Id " + event_id + " - reconciling"))
        if saved_event["Item"]["version"] < event["detail"]["version"]:
            print("Received event is a more recent version than the stored event - updating")
            table.put_item(
                Item=new_record
            )
        else:
            print("Received event is an older version than the stored event - ignoring")
    else:
        print(("Saving new event - ID " + event_id))

        table.put_item(
            Item=new_record
        )

The following Fargate example shows a Lambda function written in Python 3.9 that captures task state change events and saves them to the following Amazon DynamoDB table:

import json
import boto3

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    id_name = ""
    new_record = {}

    # For debugging so you can see raw event format.
    print('Here is the event:')
    print((json.dumps(event)))

    if event["source"] != "aws.ecs":
       raise ValueError("Function only supports input from events with a source type of: aws.ecs")

    # Switch on task/container events.
    table_name = ""
    if event["detail-type"] == "ECS Task State Change":
        table_name = "ECSTaskState"
        id_name = "taskArn"
        event_id = event["detail"]["taskArn"]
    else:
        raise ValueError("detail-type for event is not a supported type. Exiting without saving event.")

    new_record["cw_version"] = event["version"]
    new_record.update(event["detail"])

    # "status" is a reserved word in DDB, but it appears in containerPort
    # state change messages.
    if "status" in event:
        new_record["current_status"] = event["status"]
        new_record.pop("status")


    # Look first to see if you have received a newer version of an event ID.
    # If the version is OLDER than what you have on file, do not process it.
    # Otherwise, update the associated record with this latest information.
    print("Looking for recent event with same ID...")
    dynamodb = boto3.resource("dynamodb", region_name="us-east-1")
    table = dynamodb.Table(table_name)
    saved_event = table.get_item(
        Key={
            id_name : event_id
        }
    )
    if "Item" in saved_event:
        # Compare events and reconcile.
        print(("EXISTING EVENT DETECTED: Id " + event_id + " - reconciling"))
        if saved_event["Item"]["version"] < event["detail"]["version"]:
            print("Received event is a more recent version than the stored event - updating")
            table.put_item(
                Item=new_record
            )
        else:
            print("Received event is an older version than the stored event - ignoring")
    else:
        print(("Saving new event - ID " + event_id))

        table.put_item(
            Item=new_record
        )