HN Explorer

Amazon Web Services to Reboot 10% of Infrastructure Due to Xen Security Advisory

7 points by blantonl ↗ HN
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

One or more of your Amazon EC2 instances are scheduled to be rebooted for required host maintenance in order to deploy important updates. These updates must be completed by 3/10 before the underlying issues we are addressing are made public as part of an upcoming Xen Security Advisory (XSA). Following security best practices, the details behind these issues will be withheld until then. Security and operational excellence are our top priorities, and therefore we occasionally need to do host maintenance on short notice. We have built the capability to live-update the vast majority of our fleet, however we have not yet enabled this capability on some of our older hardware. Fewer than 10% of EC2 customer instances will need to be rebooted in order to receive this update.

=== Just so happens that my business' entire infrastructure on AWS (19 servers) falls in that 10%....

3 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 15.5 ms ] thread
mobiplayer
That's unfortunate. Maybe it is time to rebuild, but this time with resilience in mind?
itl12
What impact will this have on businesses?
kjhosein
Just received this note from AWS that they've figured out how to reduce this % to less than 0.1%.

"Since then, the team has been working around the clock to find ways to minimize the impact for those requiring a reboot. We're happy to share that we'll now be able to live-update ‎the vast majority of our older hardware for this Xen Security Advisory. This means that over 99.9% of our total EC2 instances will receive the live-update and avoid a reboot. We can also now assure you that all newly launched instances will land on updated capacity, which means for the less than 0.1% of total EC2 instances that require a reboot, you can proactively re-launch these instances in order to avoid the assigned reboot timing (if you prefer)."