AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 564

A SysOps Administrator receives an email from AWS about a production Amazon EC2 instance backed by Amazon EBS that is on a degraded host scheduled for retirement. The scheduled retirement occurs during business-critical hours.
What should be done to MINIMIZE disruption to the business?

Answer options

• A. Reboot the instance as soon as possible to perform the system maintenance before the scheduled retirement.
• B. Reboot the instance outside business hours to perform the system maintenance before the scheduled retirement.
• C. Stop/start the instance outside business hours to move to a new host before the scheduled retirement.
• D. Write an AWS Lambda function to restore the system when the scheduled retirement occurs.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

For an EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instance, performing a stop and start cycle migrates the instance to a new, healthy physical host, which resolves the scheduled retirement event. A simple reboot keeps the instance on the same physical hardware, meaning options A and B will not resolve the degraded host issue. Doing the stop/start operation during off-peak hours minimizes business disruption.