Background: I run a large number of ECS Fargate services via Cloudformation. There are 3 Cloudformation stacks for our different environments (Dev, Staging, Prod). In prod and staging, we follow the expected CI/CD pipeline that is consistent with AWS’s new software version consistency philosophy.

The issue is our dev environment. We have rapid development cycles and might redeploy a modified version of a tagged image several times in an hour. Previously ECS would respect image tags and every time the container was restarted re-evauluate the ECR tag. This meant we simply uploaded an image and tagged as ‘latest’ or ‘dev’ (instead of versioned), and restarted the container to check our changes. Not it seems we are forced to create a new task defintion and update the service every time the image needs to change. This is very time consuming for our development cycles. Is there a way to set ECS behavior to how it was before ‘software version consistency’?