AWS Outage: Launching New Instance from EBS Snapshot Unsuccessful
Question
There is a very serious outage happening at AWS, and lots of services are impacted.
Your existing EC2 instances seem to work fine, and the status checks of the instances have passed.
But when you try to launch a new instance from an EBS snapshot, the operation is unsuccessful.
What might be the issue?
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.Answer - B.
The EBS Snapshots are stored in S3
If there is an outage of the S3 service, you may not be able to launch an instance from an EBS snapshot.
Option A is incorrect because this option does not mention anything about the EBS snapshot service.
Option C is incorrect because the EC2 related API calls are still working.
Otherwise, the status check of the instances will fail.
Option D is incorrect because the CloudWatch service will not impact the EBS snapshot service.
For more information on EBS Snapshots, please visit the below URL:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSSnapshots.htmlDuring a serious outage happening at AWS, it is possible that some services or infrastructure may become unavailable or experience degradation in performance. In this scenario, the existing EC2 instances seem to work fine, and the status checks of the instances have passed, indicating that they are healthy and available.
However, when attempting to launch a new EC2 instance from an EBS snapshot, the operation is unsuccessful. This issue can occur due to various reasons, and the correct answer is B: S3 has an issue. As the EBS snapshots are saved in S3, the inability to launch a new instance from the EBS snapshot indicates that there is an issue with S3.
EBS snapshots are backed up to S3, which is a highly durable and available object storage service provided by AWS. During an outage, S3 can be impacted, and this can cause issues with EBS snapshots. If S3 is experiencing an outage, it can prevent the EBS snapshots from being accessible, which, in turn, would prevent the launch of new EC2 instances from these snapshots.
Option A, stating that the AWS Console is down, so AWS CLI commands do not work, may not be the cause of the issue because the EC2 instances are working fine, and the CLI commands for EC2 instance management would not depend on the console's availability.
Option C, stating that AWS turns off all the EC2 related API calls when there are major outages to protect from system floods, is incorrect because this would not prevent the launch of new EC2 instances from existing EBS snapshots.
Option D, stating that there is an outage in the AWS CloudWatch service, is also incorrect because CloudWatch is a monitoring service, and its outage would not prevent the launch of new EC2 instances from EBS snapshots.
