Amazon EC2 Now Lets you Pause and Resume Your Workloads

Posted on: Nov 28, 2018

You can now hibernate your Amazon EC2 instances backed by Amazon EBS and resume them at a later time. Applications can pick up exactly where they left off instead of rebuilding the memory footprint all over again. For example, applications that rely on caches and other memory-centric components can take tens of minutes to preload or warm up. These factors impose a delay and can force you to over-provision in case you need incremental capacity very quickly. Using hibernate, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances with memory footprint that can get to a productive state faster. You can do this without modifying your existing applications. Hibernate is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, with your application starting up right where it left off.

Upon hibernation, your instance’s EBS root volume and any other attached EBS data volumes are persisted between sessions. Additionally, data from memory (RAM) is also saved to your EBS root volume. Upon resume, your EBS root device is restored from its prior state, including the RAM content. Previously attached data volumes are reattached and the instance retains its instance ID. While the instances are in hibernation, you pay only for the EBS volumes and Elastic IP addresses attached to it.

This feature is available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances running on freshly launched M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5 instances running Amazon Linux 1. The AMI snapshot used to launch the instance must be encrypted. This ensures protection of sensitive contents in memory (RAM) as they get copied to the root volume.

You can enable hibernation for your EBS-backed instances at launch. You can then hibernate and resume your EBS-backed EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console, or though the AWS SDK and CLI using the existing stop-instances and start-instances commands.

EC2 Instance Hibernation is now available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and EU (Frankfurt, London, Ireland, Paris) Regions.

To learn more about hibernation, visit this blog. For information about enabling hibernation for your EC2 instances, visit our FAQs or technical documentation.