Posted On: Oct 17, 2019

Amazon EC2 expands Hibernation support for Windows Server including: Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019. You can now hibernate newly launched EC2 Instances running Windows Server, in addition to Amazon Linux, Amazon Linux 2 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS OS.

Hibernation provides the convenience of pausing and resuming the instances, saves time by reducing the startup time taken by applications and saves effort in setting up the environment or applications all over again. Instead of having to rebuild the memory footprint, hibernation allows applications to pick up exactly where they left off.

Hibernation is available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances running on M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5 instances running Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Amazon Linux and Windows. For Windows, Hibernation is supported for instances up to 16 GB of RAM. For other operating systems, Hibernation is supported for instances with less than 150 GB of RAM.

The EC2 Hibernation feature is available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Frankfurt, London, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and China (Beijing – operated by Sinnet, Ningxia – operated by NWCD).


This feature is available through AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, AWS Tools for Powershell or the AWS Management Console at no extra charge. To learn more about hibernation, visit this blog. For information about enabling hibernation for your EC2 instances, visit our FAQs or technical documentation.