SFTP Gateway 2.0 Retirement Notification
Note: This page applies to SFTP Gateway version 2.x. Visit Here for documentation on version 3.x.
Overview
Every now and then, AWS will decommission hardware. This could be due to routine maintenance or underlying hardware failure. When this happens, you should receive a notification email warning you of this (refer to the bottom of the page).
The best thing to do is to stop and start your EC2 instance at your earliest maintenance window. Doing so will move your EC2 instance to different hardware. Note: restarting will not have the same effect.
Considerations
Before you stop and start your EC2 instance, here are a few things you should consider:
- SFTP Gateway stores its data on EBS or EFS (HA), so you don't need to worry about losing ephemeral data.
- The SFTP Gateway CloudFormation template provisions an Elastic IP (static IP). If you launched the EC2 instance manually, verify that you have an Elastic IP address. Otherwise, you may end up with a different public IP address after stopping your EC2 instance.
- Make sure that there are no in-memory processes in queue. In other words, let the EC2 instance finish processing file events that are already loaded into memory. You can check this using either of the commands below:
ps -ef | grep movetos3 | wc -l # this counts the number of movetos3 processes in ts
tail -f /var/log/sftpgw/movetos3.log # this monitors activity for the movetos3 script
Retirement Notification Email example
Subject: [Retirement Notification] Amazon EC2 Instance scheduled for retirement.
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
We have important news about your account (AWS Account ID: 1234567890). EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance (instance-ID: i-0275df16f57f3b554) in the us-east-1 region. Due to this degradation, your instance could already be unreachable. After 2018-08-06 07:00 UTC your instance, which has an EBS volume as the root device, will be stopped.
You can see more information on your instances that are scheduled for retirement in the AWS Management Console (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=us-east-1#Events)
- How does this affect you?
Your instance will be stopped after the specified retirement date, but you can start it again at any time. Note that if you have EC2 instance store volumes attached to the instance, any data on these volumes will be lost when the instance is stopped or terminated as these volumes are physically attached to the host computer
- What do you need to do?
You can wait for the scheduled retirement date - when the instance is stopped - or stop the instance yourself any time before then. Once the instances has been stopped, you can start the instance again at any time. For more information about stopping and starting your instance, and what to expect when your instance is stopped, such as the effect on public, private and Elastic IP addresses associated with your instance, see Stop and Start Your Instance in the EC2 User Guide (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Stop_Start.html).
- Why retirement?
AWS may schedule instances for retirement in cases where there is an unrecoverable issue with the underlying hardware. For more information about scheduled retirement events please see the EC2 user guide (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-retirement.html).
If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact the AWS Support Team on the community forums and via AWS Premium Support at: http://aws.amazon.com/support
Sincerely, Amazon Web Services This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services, Inc., 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210
Reference: AWS_EC2_PERSISTENT_INSTANCE_RETIREMENT_SCHEDULED86ff6546-e4c6-4410-95dd-b578df030989