The site went down today for a few hours and the worst thing is, it was sort of my own fault. The last time I was playing with booting from Amazon EBS I must have made a mistake when detaching volumes from the (wrong) instances. Thus, the incident was caused by the EBS volume not being attached. When I was trying out that EBS booting the one and only EBS volume which is attached to this EC2 instance had the “Attachment Information” as “busy” and not as “attached” which seems to be the standard status of a well working volume. I probably detached the volume and the status changed to “busy” state.

I remember wondering what that “busy” meant at that time. Now I know.

It should go without saying that this status information of “busy” is really, really uninformative. How about “detaching” instead when a user wants to detach a volume? And why did it take about one and a half weeks to detach? Is there a log somewhere I really did detach a volume? The lesson learned from this incident is to act if your EBS volume goes to “busy” state. All might work fine for a while but be warned, it will detach at some point. Also, it would be really nice if there would be some abstraction layer in between the real names of the volumes and instances and the ones available to customers. With this layer a user could add more descriptive names to instances or what ever objects there are. Or then really start using different accounts for development and production stuff… Really.