Amazon ECS Managed Instances adds support for managed daemons

Amazon ECS Managed Instances has added support for managed daemons. Platform engineers can deploy and update monitoring, logging, and tracing tools centrally, separate from application teams, and keep the necessary daemons consistent across all instances.

This feature extends the Managed Instances experience introduced in September 2025, separating the lifecycle of operational agents from application deployment. Daemons start before application tasks and drain last, so logging, tracing, and monitoring remain uninterrupted during updates.

Key details are as follows.

• Centralized management: Deploy and update monitoring, logging, and tracing agents independently using managed daemons
• Flexible scope: Deploy across multiple capacity providers or target a specific capacity provider only
• Resource isolation: Define the daemon's CPU and memory separately from application settings
• Host-level capabilities: Support for privileged containers, additional Linux capabilities, and host filesystem mounts

As a practical example, the flow of registering CloudWatch Agent as a managed daemon and configuring it via the Daemon task definitions and Daemons tabs in the ECS console was introduced. The new daemon task definition diagram is separated from existing task definitions and uses the daemon_bridge network mode to integrate with applications while keeping networking separate.

During deployment, ECS launches exactly one daemon process per container instance before placing application tasks. Updates also support automatic rolling deployment and rollback, minimizing gaps by bringing up the new daemon on new instances first, then moving applications over, and finally terminating existing instances.

Support for managed daemons in Amazon ECS Managed Instances is now available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost. Users only pay for the standard compute resources consumed by daemon tasks.