AWS makes auto-recovery the default for EC2 instances
(2022/03/31)
- Reference: 1648709884
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/03/31/aws_ec2_default_auto_recovery/
- Source link:
Amazon Web Services has added a small but important resilience feature: instances in its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) now include automatic recovery by default.
EC2 instances could previously be set to recover automatically by setting an alarm in Amazon CloudWatch – AWS's monitoring and observability service.
But AWS has switched recovery on by default in EC2 instances.
[1]
AWS [2]states that if an underlying hardware problem comes along, EC2 instances will therefore find themselves a new home in the Amazonian cloud – complete with its instance ID, private IP addresses, public IPv4 IP address, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata. Data in memory is, however, lost.
[3]TrendForce: AWS to give Arm a leg up to 22% of datacenter servers by 2025
[4]Alibaba Cloud opens first South Korean datacenter
[5]It's not WW3. Spotify, Discord, Google Cloud had a wobble
AWS's brief announcement of the new feature and other documentation makes no mention of recovery points for data on disks, nor the time required for an auto-recovered server to resume operations.
It's still possible to disable the auto-recovery feature. That may sound like an odd choice to make, but AWS's documentation offers one reason to consider it: instances in placement groups (an AWS feature that lets you ensure instances run a particular group of hardware) are restored to the same placement group. Hardware faults in a server could easily be an indication of a problem in a rack or row, so perhaps auto-recovery into an unstable environment is a less attractive option than auto-recovery into another availability zone or region.
[6]
AWS recommends working across multiple availability zones for the sake of resilience, while [7]failures in big regions like the venerable US-EAST-1 served notice that building for resilience across multiple regions is also entirely sensible. ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YkV70jrdV19fL2ZJ0m84rQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/03/amazon-ec2-default-automatic-recovery/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/aws_arm_servers_datacenters/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/31/alibaba_cloud_south_korea_opening/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/08/spotify_discord_outage/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YkV70jrdV19fL2ZJ0m84rQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/07/aws_wobbles_is_us_east/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
EC2 instances could previously be set to recover automatically by setting an alarm in Amazon CloudWatch – AWS's monitoring and observability service.
But AWS has switched recovery on by default in EC2 instances.
[1]
AWS [2]states that if an underlying hardware problem comes along, EC2 instances will therefore find themselves a new home in the Amazonian cloud – complete with its instance ID, private IP addresses, public IPv4 IP address, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata. Data in memory is, however, lost.
[3]TrendForce: AWS to give Arm a leg up to 22% of datacenter servers by 2025
[4]Alibaba Cloud opens first South Korean datacenter
[5]It's not WW3. Spotify, Discord, Google Cloud had a wobble
AWS's brief announcement of the new feature and other documentation makes no mention of recovery points for data on disks, nor the time required for an auto-recovered server to resume operations.
It's still possible to disable the auto-recovery feature. That may sound like an odd choice to make, but AWS's documentation offers one reason to consider it: instances in placement groups (an AWS feature that lets you ensure instances run a particular group of hardware) are restored to the same placement group. Hardware faults in a server could easily be an indication of a problem in a rack or row, so perhaps auto-recovery into an unstable environment is a less attractive option than auto-recovery into another availability zone or region.
[6]
AWS recommends working across multiple availability zones for the sake of resilience, while [7]failures in big regions like the venerable US-EAST-1 served notice that building for resilience across multiple regions is also entirely sensible. ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YkV70jrdV19fL2ZJ0m84rQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/03/amazon-ec2-default-automatic-recovery/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/aws_arm_servers_datacenters/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/31/alibaba_cloud_south_korea_opening/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/08/spotify_discord_outage/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YkV70jrdV19fL2ZJ0m84rQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/07/aws_wobbles_is_us_east/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
About time
Why did this take so long? Of course I don't want a VM to randomly die one day because of something I forgot to do, or hadn't yet learned I needed to do.