Opportunistic initiation of potentially invasive actions

摘要

A system and method for opportunistically initiating potentially invasive actions on a computer system hosting virtual machine instances is described. When a specific state of operation of the VMI or computing service is detected, such as inactivity, an action, such as a reboot, kernel update, or other potentially invasive action can be performed on the software and/or hardware supporting the VMI. In addition to the foregoing, other aspects are described in the claims, detailed description, and figures.

主权项

1. A system, comprising:
a processor coupled to a memory, the memory including instructions that upon execution by the processor cause the system to: launch one or more virtual machine instances (VMIs) that are each accessible to one or more client devices across a network; determine to initiate an action on at least one of the one or more VMIs, based at least in part on state information associated with the at least one of the one or more VMIs, wherein the initiation of the action results in a disruption of the at least one of the one or more VMIs; compare (i) a priority rating of the action and (ii) a priority rating of the at least one of the one or more VMIs, wherein the priority rating of the action specifies a priority of the action relative to priorities of other actions, and the priority rating of the at least one of the one or more VMIs specifies a priority of the at least one of the one or more VMIs relative to priorities of one or more other VMIs; in response to the priority rating of the at least one of the one or more VMIs being higher than the priority rating of the action, (i) cause a delay in initiating the action, (ii) initiate the action when the virtual machine transitions to an idle state, and (iii) cause a reboot of the system; and in response to the priority rating of the action being higher than the priority rating of the at least one of the one or more VMIs, initiate the action without causing the delay and without waiting for the virtual machine to transition to the idle state, and cause a reboot of the system.