In my project I have a constraint where all of the traffic received will go to a certain IP. The Elastic IP feature works well for this.
My question is, considering we are using Amazon's docker service (ECS) without autoscaling (so instances/tasks will be scaled manually), can we treat the instances created by the ECS service as we would treat normal, on-demand instances? As in they won't be terminated/stopped unless explicitly done by a user (or API call or whatever).
As is mentioned in the Scaling a Cluster documentation, if you created your cluster after November 24th, 2015 using either the first run wizard, or the Create Cluster wizard, then an Autoscaling group would have been created to manage the instances backing your cluster.
For the most part, the answer to your question is Yes. The instances wouldn't normally go about getting replaced. It is also important to note that because this is backed by an auto scaling group, AutoScaling might go about Replacing unhealthy instances for you. If an instance fails it EC2 Health Checks for some reason, it will be marked as unhealthy, and scheduled for replacement.
By default, my understanding is there are no CloudWatch Alarms or Scaling Policies effecting this AutoScaling group, so it should just be when an instance becomes healthy that it would get replaced.