The AWS SDK provides a number of waiters that allow you to block your code while waiting for a process to complete. One that we make use of in our managed ECS container rollout is the services_stable waiter. This will wait for a defined amount of time for an ECS service to become stable, or raise an exception.

# bring in the boto3 import
import boto3
import botocore

# create a session object
session = boto3.session.Session()

# create an ECS client
ecs = session.client('ecs')

# trigger an update to the service
ecs.update_service(cluster='myCluster',
									 service='myService',
                   taskDefinition='myServiceTaskDefinition:10')

# create a waiter
waiter = ecs.get_waiter('services_stable')

try:
	logger.info('waiting for myService to become stable')

	# call the wait method passing in an array of services you want to wait for
	waiter.wait(cluster='myCluster', services=['myService'])

except botocore.exceptions.WaitError as wex:
	logger.error('The service 'myService' didn't become stable. {}'.format(wex))

The Boto3 documentation has the available waiters for each service that supports them, for example the ecs waiters can be found here.{:target=”_blank”}

By default, the ServicesStable waiter will check every 15 seconds for 40 attempts. You can pass overrides into the wait call if required;

waiter.wait(cluster_name='myCluster',
						services=['myService'],
					  WaiterConfig={'Delay': 30, 'MaxAttempts': 10})

This will wait for 5 minutes (300 seconds) for the service to become stable before throwing a botocore.exceptions.WaitError if not successful.

If you’re waiting for a large number of services, its worth noting that you can only pass 10 services at a time, so you’ll need to chunk them.