Stop and start Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Manually stop and startAutomatically stop and start Find running and stopped instances
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Stop and start Amazon EC2 instances

You can stop and start your instance if it has an Amazon EBS volume as its root device. When you stop an instance, it shuts down. When you start an instance, it is typically migrated to a new underlying host computer and assigned a new public IPv4 address.

When you stop an instance, it is not deleted. If you decide that you no longer need an instance, you can terminate it. For more information, see Terminate Amazon EC2 instances. If you want to hibernate an instance to save the contents from the instance memory (RAM), see Hibernate your Amazon EC2 instance. For distinctions between instance lifecycle actions, see Differences between reboot, stop, hibernate, and terminate.

Contents

Manually stop and start your instances

You can stop and start your Amazon EBS-backed instances (instances with EBS root devices). You can't stop and start instances with instance store root device.

Warning

When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased. Before you stop an instance, verify that you've copied any data that you need from the instance store volumes to persistent storage, such as Amazon EBS or Amazon S3.

Console
To stop and start an Amazon EBS-backed instance

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the left navigation pane, choose Instances, and then select the instance.

  3. On the Storage tab, verify that Root device type is EBS. Otherwise, you can't stop the instance.

  4. Choose Instance state, Stop instance. If this option is disabled, either the instance is already stopped or its root device is an instance store volume.

  5. When prompted for confirmation, choose Stop. It can take a few minutes for the instance to stop.

  6. To start a stopped instance, select the instance, and choose Instance state, Start instance.

  7. It can take a few minutes for the instance to enter the running state.

  8. If you stopped an Amazon EBS-backed instance and it appears "stuck" in the stopping state, you can forcibly stop it. For more information, see Troubleshoot stopping your instance.

Command line
Prerequisites

Verify that the root device of the instance is an EBS volume. For example, run the describe-instances Amazon CLI command and verify that RootDeviceType is ebs, not instance-store.

To stop and start an Amazon EBS-backed instance

Use one of the following commands:

Automatically stop and start your instances

You can automate stopping and starting instances with the following services:

Instance Scheduler on Amazon

You can use Instance Scheduler on Amazon to automate the starting and stopping of EC2 instances. For more information, see How do I use Instance Scheduler with CloudFormation to schedule EC2 instances? Note that additional charges apply.

Amazon Lambda and an Amazon EventBridge rule

You can use Lambda and an EventBridge rule to stop and start your instances on a schedule. For more information, see How do I stop and start Amazon EC2 instances at regular intervals using Lambda?

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

To ensure you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for an application, create Auto Scaling groups. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures that your application always has the right capacity to handle the traffic demand, and saves costs by launching instances only when they are needed. Note that Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling terminates, rather than stops, unneeded instances. To set up Auto Scaling groups, see Get started with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Find all running and stopped instances

You can find all of your running and stopped instances across all Amazon Web Services Regions on a single page using Amazon EC2 Global View. This capability is especially useful for taking inventory and finding forgotten instances. For information about how to use Global View, see Amazon EC2 Global View.