EC2 Serial Console
aws.amazon.com
EC2 Serial Console
1–10 of 121 posts
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#2This seems to be such an obvious feature that I'm surprised they are only adding this now.
I'm not an expert in hypervisors or anything like that and so I'm wondering what was stopping them from adding it in the past?
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#3Oh thank god. I had a customer once that erased their SSH keys, and had a running database cluster on EC2 that they couldn't get access too anymore. That was... fun.
This is a long time coming.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#4Oh thank god. I had a customer once that erased their SSH keys, and had a running database cluster on EC2 that they couldn't get access too anymore. That was... fun. This is a long time coming.
Sure there’s down time involved, but you can always stop and mount the volumes elsewhere and then update the SSH keys.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#5Oh thank god. I had a customer once that erased their SSH keys, and had a running database cluster on EC2 that they couldn't get access too anymore. That was... fun. This is a long time coming.
Sure there’s down time involved, but you can always stop and mount the volumes elsewhere and then update the SSH keys.
They could not accept downtime. They were also using a database that had it's consistency guarantees scaled back for "web scale" reasons and were terrified of what a hard reset would do. Yes, the VM could just disappear randomly anyway, which made doing that a very poor choice.
There were a whole lot of questionable prior decisions that had been made that did not help.
You learn a lot in situations like this about being helpful with the customer without being judgey. Get them back on their feet with a smile when they thought they were screwed keeps a lot of contracts around.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#6This seems to be such an obvious feature that I'm surprised they are only adding this now. I'm not an expert in hypervisors or anything like that and so I'm wondering what was stopping them from adding it in the past?
The biggest reason is probably security. This is not something you want to take chances with.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#7This seems to be such an obvious feature that I'm surprised they are only adding this now. I'm not an expert in hypervisors or anything like that and so I'm wondering what was stopping them from adding it in the past?
I get this sense they are very conservative in their feature set there? Nested VMs for example are supposed in GCP, Azure and Oracle clouds I think, but not AWS. VM migration too I think exists in GCP at least, but not AWS. It's interesting.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#8Not gonna lie... if I ever got into a situation where I needed serial access to an EC2 instance, I'd just retire the EC2 instance and spin up another one.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#9This is amazing.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure there’s down time involved, but you can always stop and mount the volumes elsewhere and then update the SSH keys.
They could not accept downtime. They were also using a database that had it's consistency guarantees scaled back for "web scale" reasons and were terrified of what a hard reset would do. Yes, the VM could just disappear randomly anyway, which made doing that a very poor choice. There were a whole lot of questionable prior decisions that had been made that did not help. You learn a lot in situations like this about be…
Probably shouldn't have erased their SSH keys then.