Posted On: Oct 2, 2023

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances (Amazon EC2 instances) now support Hibernation for the Microsoft Windows Server 2022, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, and Amazon Linux 2023 operating systems. Hibernation is an Amazon EC2 feature that helps lower costs and achieve faster startup times by enabling customers to pause and resume their running instances at scale. Customers are not billed for compute time while instances are suspended, and your applications will resume from right where they left off.

Upon hibernation, an instance’s EBS root volume and any attached EBS data volumes are saved to disk. The data from memory (RAM) is also preserved. When a hibernated instance is resumed, the EBS root volume is restored from its prior state, along with the RAM state and any previously attached data volumes. 

For these operating systems and others already supported, customers can configure Hibernate on a variety of instance types, with new types supported regularly. Hibernation is available in all commercial AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Hibernate 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 and User Guide.