Most often, we receive the EC2 Hardware Degradation notice, when there is a hardware malfunction.

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today,  let us see what we need to do in this scenario.

EC2 Hardware Degradation

In case of a hardware malfunction, Amazon EC2 tags the specific hardware as faulty. Hence, it moves the instances running on the faulty hardware hypervisor to healthy hardware.

During the transition, the Amazon EBS-backed instances will stop, and instance store-backed instances will terminate.

We receive a notification through email and to your Personal Health Dashboard about the hardware degradation and of the upcoming instance stop or termination.

How to resolve the degradation?

When we receive the notice, we can manually stop and start the instance via the Amazon EC2 console or AWS CLI.

In addition, we make sure to use the most recent version of the AWS CLI.

Stop and start the instance

This is not equivalent to a reboot.

We need a start to migrate the instance to healthy hardware. On the other hand, stop removes the instance from the faulty hardware.

Our Support Techs recommend to keep in mind the following before proceeding:

• When we stop and start the instance, the instance store data is lost.
• If the instance is part of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group or if the instance is launched by services that use AWS Auto Scaling then stopping the instance could terminate the instance.
• The start and stop of instance change the public IP address of the instance. Hence, it is best to use an Elastic IP address instead of a public IP address when we route external traffic.

To stop and start the instance, our Support Techs recommend the following steps:

1. Initially, we open the Amazon EC2 console and select the instance.
2. Then we go to, Actions > Instance State > Stop > Yes, Stop.
3. After that, we select the instance again.
4. Select Actions > Instance State > Start > Yes, Start.

The hardware degradation notification will remain with a status of Completed until the stop or terminates date listed in the notification.

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Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs fix the EC2 Hardware Degradation.