Amazon ECS task lifecycle - Amazon Elastic Container Service
Lifecycle states
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Amazon ECS task lifecycle

When a task is started, either manually or as part of a service, it can pass through several states before it finishes on its own or is stopped manually. Some tasks are meant to run as batch jobs that naturally progress through from PENDING to RUNNING to STOPPED. Other tasks, which can be part of a service, are meant to continue running indefinitely, or to be scaled up and down as needed.

When task status changes are requested, such as stopping a task or updating the desired count of a service to scale it up or down, the Amazon ECS container agent tracks these changes as the last known status (lastStatus) of the task and the desired status (desiredStatus) of the task. Both the last known status and desired status of a task can be seen either in the console or by describing the task with the API or Amazon CLI.

The flow chart below shows the task lifecycle flow.

Diagram of the task lifecycle states. The states are PROVISIONING, PENDING, ACTIVATING, RUNNING, DEACTOVATING, STOPPING.

Lifecycle states

The following are descriptions of each of the task lifecycle states.

PROVISIONING

Amazon ECS has to perform additional steps before the task is launched. For example, for tasks that use the awsvpc network mode, the elastic network interface needs to be provisioned.

PENDING

This is a transition state where Amazon ECS is waiting on the container agent to take further action. A task stays in the pending state until there are available resources for the task.

ACTIVATING

This is a transition state where Amazon ECS has to perform additional steps after the task is launched but before the task can transition to the RUNNING state. For example, for tasks that have service discovery configured, the service discovery resources must be created. For tasks that are part of a service that's configured to use multiple Elastic Load Balancing target groups, the target group registration occurs during this state.

RUNNING

The task is successfully running.

DEACTIVATING

This is a transition state where Amazon ECS has to perform additional steps before the task is stopped. For example, for tasks that are part of a service that's configured to use multiple Elastic Load Balancing target groups, the target group deregistration occurs during this state.

STOPPING

This is a transition state where Amazon ECS is waiting on the container agent to take further action.

For Linux containers, the container agent will send the SIGTERM signal to notify the application needs to finish and shut down, and then send a SIGKILL after waiting the StopTimeout duration set in the task definition.

DEPROVISIONING

Amazon ECS has to perform additional steps after the task has stopped but before the task transitions to the STOPPED state. For example, for tasks that use the awsvpc network mode, the elastic network interface needs to be detached and deleted.

STOPPED

The task has been successfully stopped.

If your task stopped because of an error, see Viewing Amazon ECS stopped task errors.

DELETED

This is a transition state when a task stops. This state is not displayed in the console, but is displayed in describe-tasks.