EC2 Hibernation feature is now available to customers in the Europe (Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions

Posted on: Jul 17, 2019

The EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions. Hibernation gives you the ability to launch EC2 instances, set them up as desired, hibernate them, and then quickly bring them back to life when you need them. Applications pick up exactly where they left off instead of rebuilding their memory footprint. Using hibernate, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster, and you can do this without modifying your existing applications.

Hibernation requires an EC2 instance to be an encrypted Amazon EBS-backed instance. This ensures protection of sensitive contents in memory (RAM) as they get copied to EBS upon hibernation. You can now enable Amazon EBS Encryption by Default, to ensure all new EBS volumes created in your account are encrypted. You no longer have to create an encrypted copy of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) before launching an instance. Alternatively, you can also now specify encryption intent at launch (with unencrypted AMI or snapshot) and enable hibernation at the same time (see link).  

Hibernation is available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances running on newly launched M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5 instances running Amazon Linux (1). With this expansion, EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, London, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm) AWS Regions.

This feature is available through AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, 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. For more information about EBS Encryption by Default, visit this link or technical documentation.