AWS users fret over downtime ahead of Amazon's massive EC2 reboot

Summary: Amazon is preparing for a massive reboot of EC2 instances across the globe to remedy a security flaw.
 
By Liam Tung | September 25, 2014
 
Amazon Web Services has kicked off a large scale maintenance reboot of Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2) instances across the world in what appears to be a response to critical security flaw.
Amazon has told EC2 customers by email that it's gearing up to reboot a range of EC2 instance types across all availability zones over the next few days, and that users won't be able to do anything to stop the process.
Amazon occasionally schedules instances for a reboot to apply patches, upgrades, or maintain a host, but in this case hasn't told users what's behind this month's overhaul, causing some to speculate that it is applying a pre-released but embargoed (XSA-108) fix for a bug in the open source hypervisor, Xen.
 

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Some AWS users have also expressed concern on the AWS user forum that they've been given too short notice to monitor services that may be affected during the maintenance event. Meanwhile, others have commended AWS for forcing a reboot at the expense of some downtime rather than allowing instances to continue running insecurely.
 
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