Amazon has commenced a massive reboot of its EC2 servers in a bid to patch a security bug, which if unpatched would have affected its customers in a much larger way.
Amazon started informing its customers of the eminent reboot through emails by stating that they will not be able to do anything to stop the reboot. The process started off at September 26, 2014, at 2:00 UTC/GMT (September 25, 2014, at 7:00 PM PDT) and will continue till September 30, 2014, at 23:59 UTC/GMT (September 30, 2014, at 4:59 PM PDT).
Users have voiced their concerns with a few claiming that Amazon didn’t provide them with enough notice time. In a bid to address some of these concerns, Amazon said that the reboot will be carried out across all availability zones, but in a staggered fashion offering users some level of redundancy.
Further, Amazon is yet to disclose details of the bug that is being patched as the security advisory for the bug is currently under embargo. However, it is said that the bug is to do with open source hypervisor, Xen.
Thorsten Von Eicken, founder of cloud management firm RightScale, in a blog post has talked about the possible issues that users may face due to the scale of the reboot that Amazon is undertaking.
“As usual, AWS is totally tight-lipped about the underlying cause. It seems obvious that the company is patching a security vulnerability, but it will not disclose which one until October 1 — that is, after they have patched all hosts”, notes Thorsten.
Von Eicken has added that T1, T2, M2, R3, and HS1 instance types are not affected and users need to check their AWS console to get more information on the instances that will be rebooted.
You can find more information about EC2 reboot from Amazon here.
