Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Types of scheduled events
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Scheduled events for Amazon EC2 instances

Amazon can schedule events for your instances, such as a reboot, stop/start, or retirement. These events do not occur frequently. If one of your instances will be affected by a scheduled event, Amazon sends an email to the email address that's associated with your Amazon account prior to the scheduled event. The email provides details about the event, including the start and end date. Depending on the event, you might be able to take action to control the timing of the event. Amazon also sends an Amazon Health event, which you can monitor and manage by using Amazon CloudWatch Events. For more information about monitoring Amazon Health events with CloudWatch, see Monitoring Amazon Health events with CloudWatch Events.

Scheduled events are managed by Amazon; you cannot schedule events for your instances. You can view the events scheduled by Amazon and perform actions when an instance is scheduled to reboot, retire, or stop.

To update the contact information for your account so that you can be sure to be notified about scheduled events, go to the Account Settings 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 Auto Scaling instances 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 backed by Amazon EBS.

  • Instance retirement: At the scheduled time, the instance is stopped if it is backed by Amazon EBS, or terminated if it is backed by instance store.

  • 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.

Contents