Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Types of scheduled events

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 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 events for your instances, where the event occurs at a scheduled time:

  • 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: 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: At the scheduled time, the instance is rebooted.

  • System reboot: At the scheduled time, the host for the instance is rebooted.

  • System maintenance: At the scheduled time, the instance might be temporarily affected by network maintenance or power maintenance.

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