Three years on GCP here... I’ve not once received one of these notifications. In my prior 7 years on AWS, these happened all the time, especially when you run a lot of VMs in different zones/regions (probably less visible if you are all in one zone).

Live migrations is amazing.

Now if only Google paid more attention to certain features of their GLB... amazing tech with showstopper bugs means amazing tech I can’t use. (Also means it’s not so amazing)

It depends on a lot, like region, instance type, security issues, etc. No notices is still better than any, and live migration also helps with reliability by moving your VM if possible instead of it going down with the host.

I think he means the notice is sent 24h before the scheduled maintenance. They don’t always provide a lot of advance notice.

That's why I'm confused, 7 years on AWS and never had less than 1 month notice.

Sounds like you've never seen an actual hardware failure; you've only seen scheduled maintenance. You don't get any notice at all with host failures. You get an email like this:

"We have important news about your account (AWS Account ID: XXXX). EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance (instance-ID: i-XXXX) in the us-east-1 region. Due to this degradation, your instance could already be unreachable. After 2018-12-28 19:00 UTC your instance, which has an EBS volume as the root device, will be stopped."

The stop date is 2 weeks after the email is sent, but as the message states, the instance is likely already dead. It was already dead in this case. GCP will live migrate your instance to another host.

That's the email I get. I had 1 in 2018 but it was 4 weeks from the received date, not 2. Only a couple of our servers are older than 12 months tho, we usually generate new AMI's roll them out to keep them up to date.

I wouldn't jinx it.

Like the parent said; we used to receive these notices quite frequently and the amount of time varies wildly. I should ask the teams who currently/primarily use AWS perhaps the situation has changed?

But it was not uncommon to have 24hrs of notice, especially for instances in US-EAST2 for some reason.

We use us-west-2, but I'm touching wood non-the-less.