AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 794

A user has launched an EBS backed EC2 instance in the US-East-1a region. The user stopped the instance and started it back after 20 days. AWS throws up an
`˜InsufficientInstanceCapacity' error. What can be the possible reason for this?

Answer options

• A. AWS does not have sufficient capacity in that availability zone
• B. AWS zone mapping is changed for that user account
• C. There is some issue with the host capacity on which the instance is launched
• D. The user account has reached the maximum EC2 instance limit

Correct answer: A

Explanation

The `InsufficientInstanceCapacity` error indicates that AWS does not currently have enough available physical hardware to support the requested EC2 instance type in the specified Availability Zone. This often occurs when trying to restart a stopped instance during peak demand periods because stopped instances release their hardware allocation. Other issues, such as exceeding account limits, would trigger an `InstanceLimitExceeded` error instead.