What do I do when my Amazon EC2 instance is scheduled for retirement?

Short description

If there's an irreparable failure in the infrastructure that hosts your EC2 instance, then Amazon EC2 schedules the instance for retirement. Issues include unrecoverable software that requires replacement, and hardware failures that require replacement, such as a faulty power supply, hard disk, or server component.

To resolve this issue, stop and then start the instance at your preferred time before the instance retirement date. When you stop and start your instance, Amazon EC2 moves it to another healthy host.

Note: Because instance retirement is often the result of unexpected software or hardware failure, the underlying host might become inaccessible before the scheduled retirement date. For more information, see How do I address the degradation of underlying hardware that hosts my EC2 instance?

Resolution

Note: If you receive errors when you run AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands, then see Troubleshooting errors for the AWS CLI. Also, make sure that you're using the most recent AWS CLI version.

Check for instances that are scheduled for retirement

Note: You might receive a retirement notice in your AWS Health Dashboard until the scheduled event time.

You receive an email about instances that are scheduled for retirement to the email that you associated with your AWS account. If you don't receive an email, then make sure that the email in your account is correct.

To manually view scheduled events for your instance, take one of the following actions:

• Open the Amazon EC2 console, and then choose Scheduled events.
• Run the following describe-instance-status AWS CLI command:

  aws ec2 describe-instance-status
      --instance-ids 1234567890abcdef

  Note: Replace 1234567890abcdef with your instance ID.
• (Windows instances only) Run the following PowerShell command:

  Get-EC2InstanceStatus

Prepare your instance for a stop and start before its retirement date

Note: When you stop and start an instance, the instance's public IP address changes. It's a best practice to use an Elastic IP address to route external traffic to your instance instead of a public IP address. If you use Amazon Route 53, then you might need to update the Route 53 DNS records when the public IP address changes. A stop and start is different from an instance reboot. For more information, see How EC2 instance stop and start works.

Before you stop and start your instance, take the following actions:

• Create a snapshot of your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. If you experience issues, then you can use the snapshot to restore your instance.
  Note: Data that you store on Amazon EBS volumes persists when you stop and restart your instance.
• Temporarily remove the instance from its Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group so that you don't accidentally terminate the instance when you stop it.
  Note: EC2 Auto Scaling might terminate stopped instances in an Auto Scaling group based on your scale-in protection settings. Instances that you launch with Amazon EMR, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS Elastic Beanstalk might be in an Auto Scaling group.
• Set the instance shutdown behavior to Stop to make sure that the instances don't terminate when you stop them.

Stop and start your instance

Note: Capacity dynamically changes for On-Demand Instances. You might receive an "InsufficientInstanceCapacity" error when you start an instance that you stopped. To avoid this error, use On-Demand Capacity Reservations. For troubleshooting steps, see How do I troubleshoot InsufficientInstanceCapacity errors when I start or launch an EC2 instance?

Stop and start an Amazon EBS-backed instance

Complete the following steps:

1. Complete the requirements for an EBS-backed instance.
2. Stop your instance.
   Note: Underlying hardware degradation might cause your instance to get stuck in the Stopping state. To resolve this issue, force stop your instance.
3. Start your instance.

Stop and start an instance store-backed instance

Complete the following steps:

1. Complete the requirements for an instance store-backed instance.
2. Save the volume data on the instance store to persistent storage, such as EBS volumes or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.
   Important: Amazon EC2 deletes instance store data when you stop the instance.
3. Stop your instance.
4. Start your instance.