Why are there so many updates to ECS Containers, i.e. ElasticContainerService task patching retirement

AWS has been applying frequent updates and patches to the underlying Fargate infrastructure primarily for security and stability reasons, which explains why you've been receiving these "ElasticContainerService task patching retirement" notifications so frequently.

The increased frequency of these notifications (four in November alone) is unusual compared to historical patterns. These updates are part of AWS's responsibility to maintain the underlying infrastructure in the shared responsibility model for Fargate, where AWS handles the platform maintenance while customers manage their applications.

When AWS deploys a new platform version revision, tasks running on previous platform versions are scheduled for retirement. These notifications are not related to your task revision but to the underlying Fargate platform version that your tasks are running on.

Regarding your approach of manually redeploying services across environments to control when the updates occur - this is a valid strategy. Instead of waiting for AWS to automatically replace tasks during the specified retirement window, you can control the timing by using the force-new-deployment option:

aws ecs update-service --cluster your-cluster --service your-service --force-new-deployment

For automating this process, you could implement:

1. A CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild to automate force deployments
2. CloudWatch Events to trigger a Lambda function for automatic force-deployment

While these updates are likely critical for security and stability, AWS doesn't typically provide specific details about what each patch addresses. The overlapping nature of these notifications (where a new one starts before the previous one ends) suggests AWS may be addressing different components of the infrastructure in stages rather than combining all updates into less frequent, potentially more disruptive changes.

If this frequency is causing operational challenges for your team, you might want to reach out to AWS Support for more specific information about the current update cycle and when the frequency might stabilize.
Sources
AWS Fargate new platform notifications | AWS re:Post
ElasticContainerService task patching retirement -> Why 2 entities are affected even it is running in latest task revision | AWS re:Post
Task retirement and maintenance for AWS Fargate on Amazon ECS - Amazon Elastic Container Service