Insufficient capacity in availability zone on AWS

Question

I got the following error from AWS today. "We currently do not have sufficient m3.large capacity in the Availability Zone you requested (us-east-1a). Our system will be working on provisioning additional capacity. You can currently get m3.large capacity by not specifying an Availability Zone in your request or choosing us-east-1e, us-east-1b."

What does this mean exactly? It sounds like AWS doesn't have the physical resources to allocate me the virtual resources that I need. That seems unbelievable though.

What's the solution? Is there an easy way to change the availability zone of an instance? Or do I need to create an AMI and restore it in a new availability zone?

Answer 1

This is not a new issue. You cannot change the availability zone. Best option is to create an AMI and relaunch the instance in new AZ, as you have already said. You would have everything in place. If you want to go across regions, see this - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/CopyingAMIs.html

Answer 2

You can try getting reserved instances, which guarantee you get the instances all the time.

Answer 3

I fixed this eror by fixing my aws_region and availability_zone values. Once I added aws_subnet_ids, error msg showed me exactly which zone my ec2 was being created.

variable "availability_zone" {
    default = "ap-southeast-2c"
}

variable "aws_region" {
    description = "EC2 Region for the VPC"
    default = "ap-southeast-2c"
}
data "aws_vpc" "default" {
  default = true
}

data "aws_subnet_ids" "all" {
  vpc_id = "${data.aws_vpc.default.id}"
}


resource "aws_instance" "ec2" {
     ....
    subnet_id = "${element(data.aws_subnet_ids.all.ids, 0)}"
    availability_zone = "${var.availability_zone}"

}