A DevOps engineer must automate restart actions when EBS-backed EC2 instances receive scheduled retirement events to reduce manual work. How can this be automated?

The correct solution leverages AWS Health events, which are specifically designed to notify users about scheduled maintenance or retirement events for their AWS resources. An EventBridge rule can be configured to listen for these AWS Health events. When a scheduled retirement event for an EC2 instance is detected, EventBridge triggers an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook. This runbook can then perform the necessary stop and start actions on the affected EC2 instance, effectively migrating it to healthy underlying hardware and automating the required restart. Incorrect options: A scheduled EventBridge rule running weekly to check for retirements is inefficient and reactive, potentially missing real-time events. Hibernating an instance is not the same as a stop/start cycle for retirement events. EC2 Auto Recovery is for underlying hardware failures, not scheduled retirement events, and restricting it to a maintenance window via AWS Config is not its intended use. Manually rebooting all instances during a maintenance window is not an automated response to specific retirement events and is inefficient.