Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Types of scheduled eventsDetermine the event type

Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances

To ensure infrastructure reliability and performance, AWS can schedule events to reboot, stop, and retire your instances. These events do not occur frequently.

If one of your instances will be affected by a scheduled event, AWS notifies you in advance by email, using the email address that's associated with your AWS account. The email provides details about the event, such as the start and end dates. Depending on the event type, you might be able to take action to control the timing of the event. AWS also sends an AWS Health event, which you can monitor and manage by using Amazon EventBridge. For more information, see Monitoring events in AWS Health with Amazon EventBridge.

Scheduled events are managed by AWS. You can't schedule events for your instances. However, you can:

  • View scheduled events for your instances.

  • Customize scheduled event notifications to include or remove tags from the email notification.

  • Reschedule certain scheduled events.

  • Create custom event windows for scheduled events.

  • Take action when an instance is scheduled to reboot, stop, or retire.

To ensure that you receive notifications of scheduled events, verify your contact information on the Account page.

Note

When an instance is affected by a scheduled event, and it is part of an Auto Scaling group, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling eventually replaces it as part of its health checks, with no further action necessary on your part. For more information about the health checks performed by Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, see Health checks for instances in an Auto Scaling group in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide.

Types of scheduled events

Amazon EC2 can create the following types of scheduled events for your instances, where the event occurs at a scheduled time:

Event type Event code Event action
Instance stop instance-stop At the scheduled time, the instance is stopped. When you start it again, it's migrated to a new host. Applies only to instances with an Amazon EBS root volume.
Instance retirement instance-retirement At the scheduled time, the instance is stopped if it has an Amazon EBS root volume, or terminated if it has an instance store root volume.
Instance reboot instance-reboot At the scheduled time, the instance is rebooted. The instance stays on the host, and during the reboot, the host undergoes maintenance. This is known as an in-place reboot.
System reboot system-reboot At the scheduled time, the instance is rebooted and migrated to a new host. This is known as a reboot migration.
System maintenance system-maintenance At the scheduled time, the instance might be temporarily affected by network maintenance or power maintenance.

Determine the event type

Use one of the following methods to check what type of event is scheduled for your instance.

Console
To determine the event type

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Events.

  3. In the table, the event code appears in the Event type column.

  4. To filter the table to show only the events for instances, in the search field choose Resource type: instance from the filter list.

AWS CLI
To determine the event type

Use the describe-instance-status command. The following example specifies an instance ID. To describe all your instances, omit the instance-id parameter.

aws ec2 describe-instance-status \
    --instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0

If the instance has an associated scheduled event, the output provides information about the scheduled event. The value for Code is the event code. In the following example output, the scheduled event code is system-reboot.

[
    "Events": [
                {
                    "InstanceEventId": "instance-event-0d59937288b749b32",
                    "Code": "system-reboot",
                    "Description": "The instance is scheduled for a reboot",
                    "NotAfter": "2019-03-14T22:00:00.000Z",
                    "NotBefore": "2019-03-14T20:00:00.000Z",
                    "NotBeforeDeadline": "2019-04-05T11:00:00.000Z"
                }
              ]
]
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