EC2 - Hibernate

Introducing EC2 Hibernate, save the state.

• We know we can stop, terminate instances.

  • Stop – the data on disk (EBS) is kept intact in the next start.

  • Terminate – any EBS volumes (root) also set-up to be destroyed is lost.

• On start, the following happens:

  • First start: the OS boots & the EC2 User Data script is run.

  • Following starts: the OS boots up.

  • Then your application starts, caches get warmed up, and that can take time!

• On Hibernate.

  • The in-memory (RAM) state is preserved

  • The instance boot is much faster! (the OS is not stopped / restarted)

  • Under the hood: the RAM state is written to a file in the root EBS volume.

  • The root EBS volume must be encrypted

Use cases:

• Long-running processing

• Saving the RAM state

• Services that take time to initialize

Good to know:

• Supported Instance Families – C3, C4, C5, I3, M3, M4, R3, R4, T2, T3, …

• Instance RAM Size – must be less than 150 GB.

• Instance Size – not supported for bare metal instances.

• AMI – Amazon Linux 2, Linux AMI, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS & Windows…

• Root Volume – must be EBS, encrypted, not instance store, and large

• Available for On-Demand, Reserved and Spot Instances

• An instance can NOT be hibernated more than 60 days