Greg;
I'm almost positive I originally started the instance via BioCloudCentral, and I always use Large. I've been exclusively using BioCloudCentral for a few weeks now.
I hadn't noticed this issue until yesterday. I can definitely do whatever you need if you want to dig into the issue more.
Ah, so it was working okay for restarting clusters until recently? Do you know what the previous availability zone was, and what it is starting up now? It's possible that things could change at AWS over time in terms of availability of instances per zone, which might be causing this. Enis has some good ideas to work around these issues, but it would take a bit of work so I don't have a fix right now.
By the way, one weird thing I also noticed yesterday (maybe not related) is that my "security groups" screen is empty on the Amazon EC2 console even though my running instance says "Security Groups: CloudMan". So I guess the security group still exists but Amazon doesn't want to show it to me? (Just thought I'd mention that in case it's related).
So your security group is no longer present? This could definitely cause issues as well, although I don't believe it's related to the availability zone issue. I also don't know of any reason you wouldn't be able to see it in the console. If deleted, you'll need to restart/re-create it which should happen on a fresh start via BioCloudCentral. Thanks again for the feedback, Brad