Instance Retirement: Instance-stop

Question

We recently got the following notification regarding one of our instances:

Retiring: This instance is scheduled for retirement after December 14, 2015 at 7:00:00 PM UTC-5.

Instances that are scheduled for retirement will be shut down after the specified date. We recommend that you launch replacement instances and start migrating to them.

Availability Zone: us-east-1c
Event type: instance-stop
Event status: Scheduled
Description: The instance is running on degraded hardware
Start time: December 14, 2015 at 7:00:00 PM UTC-5

Further details show that the event type is instance-stop. Per the documentation:

Instance stop: The instance will be stopped and started to migrate it to a new host computer. Applies only to instances backed by Amazon EBS.

Instance retirement: The instance will be terminated.

Reboot: Either the instance will be rebooted (instance reboot) or the host computer for the instance will be rebooted (system reboot).

System maintenance: The instance might be temporarily affected by network maintenance or power maintenance.

Instance stop. Does this mean that we do not have to do anything? If not, what do we have to do to avoid service disruption?

Answer 1

Following solution works if your instance is not in an Auto Scaling Group.

I am assuming you are running the instance in a VPC. You cannot avoid service disruption unless you have some kind of HA. You have 2 options if the root device type is ebs.

1) You can create an AMI of your instance. Launch a new instance from that AMI and then stop the old instance.

2) Easiest option which I always prefer: Stop your instance and start it again. Thats it. New physical hardware will be chosen automatically. If your old instance had a public IP, your new instance will get a new public IP. But if your instance had elastic IP associated with it, you do not have to do anything more.