Amazon ECS now supports custom container stop signals on AWS Fargate

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports custom container stop signals for Linux tasks running on AWS Fargate, honoring the stop signal configured in Open Container Initiative (OCI) images when tasks are stopped. The enhancement improves graceful shutdown behavior by aligning Fargate task termination with each container’s preferred termination signal.

Previously, when an Amazon ECS task running on AWS Fargate was stopped, each Linux container always received SIGTERM followed by SIGKILL after the configured timeout. With the new behavior, the Amazon ECS container agent reads the stop signal from the container image configuration and sends that signal when stopping the task. Containers that rely on signals such as SIGQUIT or SIGINT for graceful shutdown can now run on Fargate with their intended termination semantics. If no STOPSIGNAL is configured, Amazon ECS continues to send SIGTERM by default.

Customers can use custom stop signals on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate by adding a STOPSIGNAL instruction (for example, STOPSIGNAL SIGQUIT) to their OCI‑compliant container images. Support for container‑defined stop signals is available in all AWS Regions. To learn more, refer to the ECS Developer Guide.