Health Check

A health check removes abnormal instances from an AS group. Then, AS adds new instances to the AS group so that the number of instances is the same as the expected number. There are two types of AS group health check.

  • ECS health check: checks ECS running status. If an ECS is stopped or deleted, it is considered as abnormal. ECS health check is the default health check mode for an AS group. The AS group periodically uses the check result to determine the running status of every instance in the AS group. If the health check result shows that an ECS is faulty, AS removes the ECS from the AS group.
  • ELB health check: determines ECS running status using a load balancing listener. If the AS group uses load balancers, the health check method can also be ELB health check. If you add multiple load balancers to an AS group, the ECS is considered normal only when all load balancers detect that the ECS status is normal. If any load balancer detects that the ECS is abnormal, the ECS will be removed from the AS group.

In both ECS health check and ELB health check modes, AS removes abnormal instances from AS groups. However, the removed instances are processed differently in the two modes:

  • Automatically added instances are billed in Pay-per-use mode by default. In such an event, AS removes and deletes such an instance if it becomes abnormal. For an instance that is manually added to the AS group, AS only removes the instance out of the AS group.
  • If you manually change the billing mode of an instance from Pay-per-use to Yearly/Monthly, AS only removes the instance out of the AS group.

When an AS group is disabled, checking instance health status continues. However, AS will not remove instances.