ylastic blog

You can now migrate Amazon Linux based AMIs between regions of your choice in Ylastic. Select your AMI, the region you want to migrate to, and that's it.

Get an email when the migration is completed.

Launch an instance at your leisure from the new AMI and off you go.

Enjoy and happy holidays!!

AWS has discovered a bug in their software that cleans up EBS snapshots in the EU West region. They are contacting customers that have snapshots affected by this bug. Here is the email that some of our customers are receiving:

Hello,

We've discovered an error in the Amazon EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots.  This has affected at least one of your snapshots in the EU-West Region.

During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West Region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process. This process compares the blocks scheduled for deletion to the blocks referenced in customer snapshots. As a result of the software error, the EBS snapshot management system in the EU-West Region incorrectly thought some of the blocks were no longer being used and deleted them. We've addressed the error in the EBS snapshot system to prevent it from recurring.

We have now disabled all of your snapshots that contain these missing blocks. You can determine which of your snapshots were affected via the AWS Management Console or the DescribeSnapshots API call. The status for any affected snapshots will be shown as "error."

We have created copies of your affected snapshots where we've replaced the missing blocks with empty blocks. You can create a new volume from these snapshot copies and run a recovery tool on it (e.g. a file system recovery tool like fsck); in some cases this may restore normal volume operation. These snapshots can be identified via the snapshot Description field which you can see on the AWS Management Console or via the DescribeSnapshots API call. The Description field contains "Recovery Snapshot snap-xxxx" where snap-xxx is the id of the affected snapshot. Alternately, if you have any older or more recent snapshots that were unaffected, you will be able to create a volume from those snapshots without error. For additional questions, you may open a case in our Support Center: https://aws.amazon.com/support/createCase

We apologize for any potential impact this might have on your applications.

Sincerely,
AWS Developer Support

EC2 block devices are really useful and we use them quite a bit over here at Ylastic. We have been improving support for specifying these mappings when you launch an EBS backed instance. Today's Ylastic release makes it very easy to do a bunch of things.

• Over-ride default block device mappings. For instance, if the AMI was created with a mapping like /dev/sda1=snap-xyz::True, you can modify it to change its default size or the delete on termination and specify it like this - /dev/sda1=snap-xyz:20:False.
• Connect instance local storage when you launch an EBS backed instance. The instance local storage drives are available but by default EC2 will not connect them to the EBS instance. So when you launch the instance, specify how you would like to connect them. For Linux, you can specify a mapping like /dev/sdb=ephemeral0, and if you are using windows, just specify it as /dev/xvdg=ephemeral0. Keep in mind that the new t1.micro instances are EBS storage only, and you will not be able to connect local instance storage to them.
• Specify multiple block device mappings at launch. As simple as can be. Just comma separate the device mappings and we will pass it on to EC2 when the instance is launched.

Here's a screenshot of the stock Windows Server EBS version (ami-c3e40daa) launched from Ylastic and connecting the first ephemeral disk to device xvdg, which shows up as drive d: in Windows File Explorer.

Enjoy :-)

Ylastic has complete support for the recently released EBS Cloudwatch metrics.

• View and drill into detailed Cloudwatch data for all your EBS volumes. Select time periods of your choice and view all the metrics on one page. All the times are in the timezone of your choice, not UTC.
  
• View EBS cloudwatch charts on your iPhone or Android. Keeps tabs on those pesky volumes while you are on the go.
  
• Set up monitors for any EBS metrics of your choice. You do want to know what's happening, right?
  
• Receive alerts via email, jabber, twitter or voice when those thresholds are triggered.
  

Manage your cloud, the easy way !

Ylastic just added tasks for scheduling your EBS backed EC2 instances.

• Start an instance and assign an elastic ip address to it on a schedule.
• Stop an instance on  schedule.

Super simple scheduling for the cloud!

Registering those snapshots as EBS backed AMIs is now really easy in Ylastic. Click an icon, provide the relevant info and register a new image!

You can now modify the attributes for a running EBS backed instance easily from Ylastic. Click an icon, set the attributes, and update your changes. This will let you protect your EC2 instances from accidental termination as explained in this nice article from Eric Hammond.

Looking for an easy way to create an EBS volume from an existing volume? Ylastic now lets you create new volumes from existing volumes in either US or EU regions with a single click - provide an alias and tell us the zone you want the volume to be in. That's it! We take care of the workflow behind the scenes in the background and will email you when the new volume is ready!

Once in a while, EBS volumes seem to get stuck in the 'detaching' state. Even after the attached instance has shutdown and gone away, the volume will continue to think that it is still 'detaching'. This seems to happen most often when the underlying instance fails or becomes unreachable. In these cases, doing a normal detach does not help, and usually the only way is to try and force the volume to detach. We just added the ability to do this inside the Ylastic GUI from the volumes page. This is to be only used as a last resort if your volume just will not finish detaching, as this can cause data loss or file system corruption.