DRHCREL05-BP03 Maintain high availability during on-premises maintenance activities
AWS Outposts hardware failures require proactive management through EC2 retirement notifications and automated failover mechanisms.
Desired outcome: Achieve high availability during scheduled maintenance in compliance with residency regulations throughout the maintenance process.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: Maintaining high availability during on-premises maintenance activities minimizes service disruptions and provides high availability while adhering to data residency requirements.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
Hardware on AWS Outposts can eventually fail and will need to be replaced. If AWS detects an irreparable issue with hardware hosting Amazon EC2 instances running on your Outpost, AWS notifies the owner of the Outpost and the owner of the instances that the affected instances are scheduled for retirement. As a design precaution, customers should architect for resiliency, just as they do in Regions (for example, by subscribing to instance retirement notifications).
The Outposts owner and EC2 instance owner (these can be different AWS accounts, as resources on the Outposts can be shared) can work together to resolve the issue. The instance owner could stop and start an affected instance to migrate it to available capacity. Instance owners can stop and start the affected instances at a convenient time.
Otherwise, AWS stops and starts the affected instances on the instance retirement date. If there is no additional capacity on the Outpost, the instance remains in the stopped state. The Outpost owner can try to free up used capacity or request additional capacity for the Outpost so that the migration can complete.
If AWS detects an irreparable issue with hardware hosting EC2 instances running on your Outpost, AWS sends an instance-retirement notice for the affected instance. For more information, see Outposts rack maintenance. When the AWS installation team arrives on site, they replace the unhealthy hosts, switches, or rack elements and bring the new capacity online.
AWS Health events such as instance-retirement are surfaced using
AWS EventBridge and
