How do I manage and reschedule Amazon EC2 instance maintenance events?

Short description

AWS schedules maintenance events on your Amazon EC2 instances to address potential issues with the underlying hardware or to maintain the infrastructure reliability and performance.

Note: When AWS schedules a maintenance event, you receive an alert before the event's date and time.

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.

You can either reschedule the maintenance event, or stop and start your instance before the specified maintenance window.

Reschedule the maintenance event

Use the Amazon EC2 console or the AWS CLI to reschedule a planned event.

Stop and start your instance

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

• Create a snapshot of your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume.
  Note: If your instance is instance store-backed or has instance store volumes that contain data, then Amazon EC2 deletes the data when you stop the instance.
• Temporarily remove the instance from its Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group.
  Note: If you stop an instance that's in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, then you might terminate the instance 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.

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 your instance has an Amazon EBS volume as its root device, then stop and start your instance to complete maintenance. If you use the Amazon EC2 console or AWS CLI to reboot the instance, then Amazon EC2 doesn't migrate the instance to a new host. A stop and start operation migrates your instance to a new underlying host. For more information, see How EC2 instance stop and start works.

The stop and start operation changes the status of the scheduled maintenance event to Completed. It can take up to 1 hour to reflect in the status change.

Related information

Types of scheduled events

Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances