Is it possible to temporary disable ECS Service to start new tasks once some tasks are stopped?

Question

I have Ruby on Rails application running on ECS. Each Service has it's own desired count. I'm using ECS Ruby SDK and Resque/Redis.

Every task should take a job from queue (Resque/Redis) and once it's finished it should take another job.

But there are situations in which there are no jobs in the queue. In that case i want to decrease the number of running tasks. There is a way to do this from ECS Ruby SDK:

  tasks_to_stop.each do |task|
    ecs.stop_task(task[0]['id'])
    ecs.update(ecs.current_desired_count - 1)
    resque.remove_worker(task[0]['ip'])
  end

In this case i loop through each task (specific task id from ECS that is not running any job) and i kill that task and after that i decrease desired_count by 1.

In most cases this will work but i can't be sure about that since some times there is a delay when i call stop_task method. It would be great if there was a way to tell ECS Service to temporary disable starting new tasks even if the number of running tasks is not the same as desired count.

Is there a way to do this from ECS GUI, AWS CLI or ECS Ruby SDK?