My AWS Mac1 Dedicated Host is stuck in a Pending state and I can't create Mac instances

Question

From the console, the dedicated host state is 'pending'. This is within us-east-1b. I am unable to release the host. I can create 1 Mac host max on my account. As such, I cannot launch a mac instance. The mac instance I was able to launch previously couldn't pass status checks and I could not ssh into it. It was after fully stopping the mac instance that the host became unavailable. TIA

Answer 1

This seemed to resolve itself over time and might be a stability issue on the AWS side. I'm going to leave this answer here because I didn't see any support on this issue elsewhere. Solidarity if you're reading this.

Answer 2

I've been spinning ec2 mac instances up and down on the same host quite a bit in the last few days and I believe it just takes a long time for the host to get out of the pending state after you terminate the instance. I think the time has been a little variable, but often it's around an hour. This makes testing things out very tedious so be really careful before you create the instance!

Also for folks that run into this, you'll not be able to release the host until it's been up for 24 hours, and you can't release when it's in a pending state. After the host has been up for 24 hours, if you remove an instance, then wait for the host to get out of the pending state, then you'll be able to release the host.