Why aren't my EMR Spot Instances being provisioned during a cluster resize?

Resolution

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) might interrupt your Spot Instance at any time for the following reasons:

• Lack of Spot capacity.
• The request constraints can't be met.
• The Spot Price is higher than the designated maximum price.
• Your Spot account quota is exhausted. If this is the case, then you can request an increase.

For more information, see Why did Amazon EC2 interrupt my Spot Instance?

Note: It's a best practice to use Spot Instances for workloads that are stateless, fault-tolerant, and flexible enough to withstand interruptions.

Also, Spot Instances and On-Demand Instances might not be resized because the bootstrap scripts were modified or contain errors.

Check the logs for the bootstrap script at /emr/instance-controller/log/bootstrap-actions or s3://cluster_id/node-failed/bootstrap-actions/stderr.gz. The logs show the error STARTUP_SCRIPT_FAILED_RET_CODE.

For example, the following bootstrap action log shows that bootstrap action 1 (emr_bootstrap_actions.sh) failed:

Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
  The other application is: yum
    Memory : 125 M RSS (444 MB VSZ)
    Started: Tue Jul 19 05:36:36 2022 - 00:03 ago
    State  : Running, pid: 7914
Error: Package: falcon-sensor-4.18.0-6403.amzn2.x86_64 (/falcon-sensor-4.18.0-6403.amzn2.x86_64)
           Requires: systemd

If you see the preceding error, then the following actions happen:

• All of the new replacement nodes terminate.
• The node stops provisioning new replacement instances.
• The core node instance group goes into arrested mode as shown in the following example:

"state": "ARRESTED",
  "message": "Instance group ig-2JN5xxxxxxxx in Amazon EMR cluster j-37H4xxxxxxx (emr-xxxxx-spark-cluster) was arrested at  for the following reason: Error provisioning instances."
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Related information

Spot Instance interruptions

Spot request status

Spot Instance best practices

Why is my Spot Instance terminating even though the maximum price is higher than the Spot price?