Q: Does Amazon ECS support applications and services?

Yes. The Amazon ECS Service scheduler can manage long-running applications and services. The Service scheduler helps you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your containers up or down to meet your application's capacity requirements. The Service scheduler allows you to distribute traffic across your containers using Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon ECS will automatically register and deregister your containers from the associated load balancer.

The Service scheduler will also automatically recover containers that become unhealthy (fail ELB health checks) or stop running to ensure you have the desired number of healthy containers supporting your application.

You can scale your application up and down by changing the number of containers you want the service to run. You can update your application by changing its definition or using a new image. The scheduler will automatically start new containers using the new definition and stop containers running the previous version (waiting for the ELB connections to drain if ELB is used).