Any reason why this isn't automatic? From the "Recover your instance" docs:
Examples of problems that cause system status checks to
fail include:
* Loss of network connectivity
* Loss of system power
* Software issues on the physical host
* Hardware issues on the physical host
All of these are on the physical host, which end users cannot control. So if AWS has an issue that kills your VM, if you don't have this setup then your instance is effectively dead?
Loss of network connectivity sounds like it could be temporary. If you have long-running calculations and want to wait for the result, it might make sense to wait a bit longer and see if the network comes up eventually.
And there's no indication that the hardware and software "issues" are permanent or even fatal.
The strategy of "wait a bit longer" can be configured with an exact value for how long to wait via this recovery feature. However, given that you don't have any information about the failure's permanence or whether it can be resolved by AWS staff without taking the host down I don't see why waiting indefinitely is a particularly good option.
In some ways, I guess this answers my own question. Amazon doesn't know how long you might want to wait or if you have a VM that you would even want to have recovered, so configuring this lets you tell Amazon what your parameters around recovery should be.
You know, it's funny but reading the EC2 forums you see several occasions where Amazon does reboot instances automatically after a failure.
I recall several posts where a customer asked a question along the lines of "Why did my instance reboot" and then someone from Amazon replied something to the effect of "Sorry there was an issue with the underlying hardware but we did restart your server on new hardware".
Perhaps it's a co-promotion for CloudWatch. I would guess quite a few of their users had never heard of or seen a use for CloudWatch. Some of them might now enable "detailed monitoring" for $3.50/mo per instance while they're at it.
