CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2
pebblexe
pebblexe

Reputation: 165

Do EC2 instances randomly start/stop?

I am trying to wrap my head around EC2 instances, and I am having a bit of an issue. I heard from a friend of mine that Amazon will kill EC2 instances, and then they restart the image (thus losing all state). Unless it uses EBS as a backing store, you get no persistence.

But I have been looking into Xen and it seems like instances should easily migrate instead of being killed/restarted.

So, do Amazon EC2 instances randomly stop/start an image with all state being managed by something external like EBS?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 917

Answers (2)

John Rotenstein
John Rotenstein

Reputation: 269340

Amazon EC2 instances will not be stopped/started/restarted unless you issue a command to do so.

In some situations (eg hardware maintenance), you might receive a request from Amazon asking you to stop & start your instance (which moves it to a different host). Such requests are typically issued with two weeks notice.

One AWS customer told me that their instance had been running continuously for over three years.

Upvotes: 3

Perennial
Perennial

Reputation: 436

Yes it is quite possible that an EC2 instance dies and is replaced. Depending upon your data, you may need to use EBS, EFS or S3 to prevent data loss in such cases.

Upvotes: 1

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