Identify and restart any running Amazon EC2 instances older than 180 days in order to ensure their reliability. An Amazon EC2 instance is not supposed to run indefinitely in the cloud and having too old instances within your AWS cloud account could increase the risk of potential issues.
This rule can help you with the following compliance standards:
- APRA
- MAS
For further details on compliance standards supported by Conformity, see here.
This rule resolution is part of the Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS.
Stopping and restarting your old Amazon EC2 instances will reallocate them to different and possibly more reliable underlying hardware (host machine).
Audit
To determine if you have old Amazon EC2 instances running in your AWS cloud account, perform the following operations:
Remediation / Resolution
To safely restart the old Amazon instances running within your AWS cloud account, perform the following operations:
Note: This conformity rule assumes that your old Amazon EC2 instances are associated with Elastic IPs (EIPs). If your old instances do not have Elastic IPs attached, you will have to update their public IP reference(s) in your cloud application or within the DNS zone file after you restart the EC2 instances.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
- CloudFormation Documentation
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud resource type reference
- Terraform Documentation
- AWS Provider
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You are auditing:
EC2 Instance Too Old
Risk Level: Low