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by zytek 4123 days ago
Been there, done that. AWS re:Boot in September 2014 showed us how good it was to invest in Ansible roles for all parts of our infrastructure. Still, a lot of hassle for Ops Team, especially that it was done during DevOps Days Warsaw ;-) AWS also said '10%' then, but for us it was 81 out of ~300 instances.

What is sad is that we learn about it from Hacker News and not from AWS, even when we have premium support and our own account manager. :/

Let's see how many of us did their homework after previous "xen update", and how much "10%" is now ;-)
2 comments
dups 4123 days ago
Similar experience here. I have a few particularly memorable experiences of dealing with the fallout from the September reboots. Although to be truthful this is partly due to the fact we were moving office and I had people jubilantly packing up around me as I worked to keep things afloat.

Not wanting a repeat of this we have migrated as many services we can into autoscaling groups, and automated all resource creation with CloudFormation.

This was inspired by this excellent Netflix blogpost: http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/a-state-of-xen-chaos-mon...

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soccerdave 4123 days ago
I have 19 instances (18 in US-West-2) and none of them are affected. I would guess that lots of people here run in us-east-1 since that's the longest running region and I would bet that a lot of that 10% exists there. So, it may be 10% total in all regions but higher percentage if you run in us-east-1. Just a guess though.
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soccerdave 4122 days ago
I guess all the Events weren't showing up yet because now I have 6 / 19 instances going down for a reboot.
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pkapkg 4122 days ago
44% of my instances in us-west-2 are affected, 55% of my instance in us-east-1, and 18% of my instances in eu-west-1 are affected. It seems to be tied pretty tightly to instance types.

Overall, I'm looking at a huge quantity of affected servers. That said, I don't blame AWS. I blame my incompetent architect for designing systems that are incredibly hard to upgrade, and that can't be rebooted safely. Definitely not bitter at that idiocy at all.

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andrioni 4122 days ago
Yeah, I'd guess it depends mainly on what type of instances you run. Only one of the 28 instances I'm running right now (all in us-east-1) is going to be rebooted, and it is the only old generation instance I still run (it's a hi1.4xlarge). None of my M3s, C3s or R3s are affected, even though some are still on PV.
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