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AWS is an extensive and robust infrastructure that provides a cloud computing platform. An Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It runs the applications using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. It facilitates the business subscribers to run application programs in the computing rostrum. One can get the opportunity of utilizing unlimited virtual machines. AWS offers many instances with different configurations to suit the user’s needs. The AWS instance sometimes becomes inaccessible. Troubleshooting the instance when it becomes unreachable without knowing the root causes is critical. An AWS instance can be unresponsive due to issues in network configuration, or when a process consumes large amounts of CPU.

Unreachable   AWS Instance
AWS network config

•         VPN tunnel connectivity issues
•         Not associated with elastic IP
•         3389 port for security group closed
•         Wrong public IP address
•         ACL blocked Amazon VPS

  High CPU usage

•         Task Scheduler
•         Custom Startup Script
•         Security software scan
•         Windows Update

Remote Desktop Services config

•         RDS disabled
•         RDS not in running state

Local network config

•         Access blocked due to local / on-premises config
•         Static IP address in TCP/IP
•         Firewall blocking connection

I have designed the fishbone template to get a neat look and feel of my cause analysis. This fishbone is a perfect example of a root cause analysis template. It has most of the main factors that make an AWS instance unreachable.

Who should use the Unreachable AWS Instance template?

• Anyone who needs to find out the potential causes for unreachable instance in AWS.
• Companies and individuals who want to understand the issues for inaccessible instance.

Why use this template?

• Easily figure out the reasons why the AWS instance is not reachable.
• Modify this template using smartQED  for your own problem-solving.
• Create or extend your own templates for various types of problem and incident analysis in smartQED.

Curated from community experience and public sources:

• https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/root-cause-analysis/
• https://www.qamentor.com/top-10-reasons-why-there-are-bugs-defects-in-software/