Amazon ECS adds LiveTaskCount and removes RunningTaskCount charge

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced LiveTaskCount on October 13, 2026, introducing a service-level metric that includes tasks still active while transitioning toward a stopped state. In the same announcement, AWS said the existing RunningTaskCount metric in CloudWatch Container Insights no longer incurs a charge.

Two task counts with different meanings

LiveTaskCount counts actively running tasks across desired states. That includes tasks undergoing connection draining during scale-in: a task can remain active even though it is on its way out.

RunningTaskCount uses a narrower definition: both the task’s current and desired state must be RUNNING. AWS describes it as a health and stability signal, while positioning LiveTaskCount for autoscaling policies and capacity planning that need a complete view of active, metric-generating tasks. These definitions and use cases come from AWS’s announcement.

Why the distinction matters for scaling

The engineering implication is that these metrics should not be treated as interchangeable totals. During scale-in, a draining task can still contribute activity without satisfying RunningTaskCount’s definition. That matters when interpreting utilization alongside service size.

A higher LiveTaskCount than RunningTaskCount is therefore not, by itself, evidence of a service fault; transition behavior can explain the difference. For dashboards and scaling calculations, choose the count based on whether the calculation needs to include all still-active tasks or only tasks whose current and desired states are both RUNNING.

Availability and billing dates

AWS says LiveTaskCount is available to all customers at no additional charge as part of ECS service utilization metrics, without opting into CloudWatch Container Insights. Both updates are available in every AWS Region where ECS is available.

RunningTaskCount remains a Container Insights metric, but its no-additional-charge pricing applies automatically from October 1, 2026—not the October 13 announcement date. AWS says no action is required for the pricing change. The announcement removes the charge for this metric; it does not announce that all Container Insights usage is free. Source: AWS.