AWS recently announced that customers can hibernate their EC2 instances (M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5) powered by AWS Graviton processors. According to the company, hibernation helps customers achieve significant cost savings and faster startup times by enabling them to pause and resume their running instances at scale.
Hibernation is designed to address the challenge of costly and time-consuming instance startup processes, particularly for memory-centric applications that require significant initialization time. With this capability, users can now hibernate their AWS Graviton-Based EC2 instances, allowing the system to save their memory contents to the associated Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) root volume. This process enables EC2 to preserve the state of the instance's EBS volumes and any attached data volumes, facilitating a seamless resumption of operations when the instance is returned online.
Basic overview of the hibernation process for EC2 instances (Source: AWS Documentation)
Jeff Barr, a Chief Evangelist for AWS, writes in a News blog post:
While the instance is in hibernation, you pay only for the EBS volumes and Elastic IP Addresses attached to it; there are no other hourly charges (just like any other stopped instance).
In addition, Akshay Ashok Nanavare, a software engineer, wrote in a blog post about EC2 Hibernation:
By intelligently pausing and resuming instances, you can save money, improve efficiency, and reduce the time it takes to get back to work. It is a powerful feature for optimizing cost and performance in your cloud infrastructure.
Furthermore, the company has ensured seamless integration of hibernation capabilities across its diverse set of tools and interfaces. Users can easily hibernate their EC2 instances through AWS CloudFormation, the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, AWS Tools for Powershell, and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).
Other hyperscalers, like Google and Microsoft, also offer hibernation in their Cloud Virtual Machine offerings. GCP allows users to suspend and resume VM instances, saving memory for storage. Azure also supports hibernation, saving memory to the OS disk and deallocating the VM to save on compute costs.
The hibernation feature is supported across a wide range of EC2 instance types, and efforts are ongoing to expand support to additional instance types. This functionality is available in commercial AWS regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) regions, offering users flexibility and accessibility across various environments.
Lastly, the company intends to continue to enhance and expand the hibernation feature; users can look forward to broader support for additional instance types, including Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, along with the SQL Server variants of the Windows AMIs, soon.