Identify and re-launch any running AWS EC2 instances older than 180 days in order to ensure their reliability. An EC2 instance is not supposed to run indefinitely in the cloud and having too old instances within your AWS your account could increase the risk of potential issues.
This rule can help you with the following compliance standards:
- APRA
- MAS
This rule resolution is part of the Cloud Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS
Stopping and relaunching your old EC2 instances will reallocate them to different and possibly more reliable underlying hardware (host machine).
Audit
To determine if you have any old (> 180 days) running EC2 instances available in your AWS account, perform the following:
Remediation / Resolution
To safely restart the old instances running inside your AWS account, perform the following:
Note: This guide assumes that your old EC2 instances are associated with Elastic IPs. If your old instances do not have Elastic IPs attached, you will have to update their public IP reference(s) in your application or within the DNS zone file after you restart the instances, as these receive new public IPs.References
- AWS Documentation
- Amazon EC2 FAQs
- Instance Lifecycle
- Stop and Start Your Instance
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- ec2
- describe-instances
- stop-instances
- start-instances
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You are auditing:
EC2 Instance Too Old
Risk level: Low