AWS status checks help the user to identify problems that would stop the instance from running an application. The AWS EC2 status check allows the user to monitor the status of system reachability and instance status. The EBS volumes are used for persistent data storage. It is always recommended to store the data to the EBS volume rather than having a transient storage for the persistent storage option. In the rarest of cases, there could be a probability that something could happen to the EBS volume, which could create inconsistency in the volume data. The AWS EBS volume status check helps to detect the impaired volumes. The impaired volume may not be available immediately.

The present guide demonstrates how to check the status of the EBS volume and enable auto enabled IO.

AWS has an offering called auto-enabled IO, which helps to gain immediate volume availability instead of persistence. This attribute change allows the user to configure a volume to automatically re-enable I/O. Though this is not recommended when data consistency is important but for a few cases like logging data or formula calculation, when the user may prefer immediate volume availability over consistency this will prove helpful.

1. When a volume is impaired, AWS will send an email notification to the AWS account owner with the necessary information.

2. Sometimes, the IO may not be auto enabled by AWS. Thus, for the purpose of immediate volume availability, AWS would send an email  to the user asking to enable IO after performing data consistency checks.

3. To enable the IO and check the status of the user’s volume, first go to the AWS Console and select the EC2 service, which shows the EC2 dashboard. Select “EBS Volume”.

4. If any volume is impaired, the status of that volume will be shown as impaired.

5. Click on any of the impaired volume. When an EBS finds that a volume’s data is potentially inconsistent, by default it disables the I/O to the volume from any attached EC2 instances to prevent data corruption. Once the I/O is disabled, the next volume status check fails and the volume status will become impaired. Click on volume status checks.

6. The volume status shows that the volume is impaired and IO is disabled. To enable the IO for this volume, click on the “Auto Enable IO” button…

… or select “Change Auto-Enable IO Setting” from the “Actions” menu.

7. AWS will show the current settings (On / Off). The user can select the checkbox to enable or disable the Auto-Enable Volume IO. Click on “Save”.

8. The Auto-Enable Volume IO will now be enabled for the user.

9. To run the above mentioned steps through the command line interface, first setup AWS EC2 CLI to launch an instance with the command line option.

10. Run the command:

ec2-describe-volume-status <volume ID>

To enable the Auto Enabled IO, first check the current status of the auto enabled IO with the following command:

ec2-describe-volume-attribute <volume ID> --auto-enable-io

To change the attribute, run the following command:

ec2-modify-volume-attribute <volume ID> --auto-enable-io true

11. The actual output of the above commands is shown below:

Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, EC2 Service, EC2 Instance, Amazon cloud computing, Amazon EBS, EBS Volume, Cloud Monitoring, Elastic Block Store, auto-enabled IO, AWS CLI, EBS Volume Inconsistency, AWS Outage