EC2 is part of the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, which acquires and releases resources depending on the traffic demand. Check whether your application is elastic as well by rebooting an EC2 instance.

Motivation

Depending on your traffic demand, you can use AWS cloud's ability to acquire and release resources automatically. Some services, such as S3 and SQS, do that automatically, while others, such as EC2, integrate with AWS Auto Scaling. Once configured, it boils down to fluctuating EC2 instances starting or shutting down frequently. Even when not using AWS Autoscaling, your EC2 instances may need to be restarted occasionally for maintenance and updating purposes. Thus, it is best practice to validate your application's behavior.

Structure

We ensure that a load-balanced user-facing endpoint fully works while having all EC2 instances available. While restarting an EC2 instance, the HTTP endpoint continues operating but may suffer from degraded performance (e.g., lower success rate or higher response time). The performance should recover to a 100% success rate once all EC2 instances are back.

Solution Sketch

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Kubernetes liveness, readiness, and startup probes