Posted On: Jan 31, 2023

You can now hibernate Elastic Block Storage-backed Amazon EC2 I3en, M6i, M6id, C6i, and C6id instances. Hibernation provides you with the convenience of pausing your instances and resuming them later from a saved state. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid — your application will start right from where it left off. By using hibernation, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster without modifying your existing applications. 

Upon hibernation, your instance’s EBS root volume and any attached EBS data volumes are persisted. The data from memory (RAM) is also saved to your EBS root volume. When your hibernated instance is resumed, the EBS root volume is restored from its prior state, and the RAM content is reloaded along with previous data volumes. 

Hibernation is available for On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances running on C3, C4, C5, C6i, C6id, I3, I3en, M3, M4, M5, M5a, M5ad, M6i, M6id, R3, R4, R5, R5a, R5ad, and T2 instances running Amazon Linux, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 LTS, and Windows Server 2012, 2012R2, 2016, and 2019. For Windows, hibernation is supported for instances with up to 16 GB of RAM. For other operating systems, hibernation is supported for instances with less than 150 GB of RAM. These instances can be hibernated in any region where EC2 Hibernate is supported.

This feature is available through AWS CloudFormation, AWS Management Console, or through the AWS SDKs, AWS Tools for Powershell, or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more, visit the news blog on hibernation. For information about enabling hibernation for your EC2 instances, visit the hibernation FAQs or User Guide.