Amazon readies major cloud server reboot

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services will be updating a substantial number of its cloud servers, and customers are recommended to re-launch their instances in the coming days, according to AWS consultants. Amazon has not said why the reboot is happening, but AWS watchers believe it is to patch a security issue. The company will be updating many of its servers between Thursday, Sept. 25 at 10 PM ET and Tuesday Sept. 30 at 7:59 PM ET, according to Amazon partner and cloud consultancy RightScale.

On Wednesday evening AWS sent out a notice to at least a portion of its customers notifying them of “required host maintenance,” according to an email an AWS user sent to Network World. The notice to customers does not explain why the reboot is necessary, but speculation is swirling that it is to patch a security bug in the Xen hypervisor…

Customers should be notified via email if their instances are impacted, or their AWS Console will notify them of virtual machine instances that will be updated, RigthtScale officials say. According to a blog post alerting customers of the reboot, RigthScale says the patches will impact all of Amazon’s regions and Availability Zones, and will affect many of the company’s virtual machine instances types. Instance types not impacted are the T1, T2, M2, R3 and HS1 instances, which would leave the C3, M3, G2 and I2 subject to patching. Amazon has not said that all instances of those affected instance types will be impacted though…

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