Posted On: Aug 19, 2021

You can now hibernate Amazon EC2 C5d, M5d, and R5d Instances. Hibernation allows you to pause your EC2 Instances and resume them at a later time, rather than fully terminating and restarting them. Resuming your instance lets your applications continue from where they left off so that you don’t have to restart your OS and application from scratch. Hibernation is useful for cases where rebuilding application state is time-consuming (e.g., developer desktops) or an application’s start-up steps can be prepared in advance of a scale-out.

It is important to note that Hibernation is currently not able to persist instance store data. Upon hibernation, your instance’s EBS root volume, any attached EBS data volumes, and the data from memory (RAM) is persisted. However, any data stored on instance store volumes will be lost. Upon resume, your EBS root device is restored from its prior state, RAM content is reloaded, previously attached EBS volumes are reattached, and the instance retains its instance ID. Applications that use instance store volumes to save ephemeral state (e.g., caches) should be resilient to the loss of this state.

Hibernation is available for On-Demand Instances running on C3, C4, C5, C5d, I3, M3, M4, M5, M5a, M5ad, M5d, R3, R4, R5, R5a, R5ad, R5d, T2, T3, and T3a 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.

Hibernation is available in all commercial AWS Regions except Asia Pacific (Osaka).

Hibernation is available through AWS CloudFormation, AWS Management Console, the AWS SDKs, AWS Tools for Powershell, or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more about Hibernation, see our FAQs, technical documentation, and blog.