Amazon EC2 Spot Can Now Stop and Start Your Spot Instances

Posted on: Sep 18, 2017

Amazon EC2 Spot now allows Amazon EBS-backed instances to be stopped in the event of interruption, instead of being terminated when capacity is no longer available at your preferred price. Spot can then fulfill your request by restarting instances from a stopped state when capacity is available within your price and time requirements. To use this new feature, choose “stop” instead of “terminate” as the interruption behavior when submitting a persistent Spot request. When you choose “stop”, Spot will shut down your instance upon interruption. The EBS root device and attached EBS volumes are saved, and their data persists. When capacity is available again within your price and time requirements, Spot will restart your instance. Upon restart, the EBS root device is restored from its prior state, previously attached data volumes are reattached, and the instance retains its instance ID.  

This feature is available for persistent Spot requests and Spot Fleets with the “maintain” fleet option enabled. You will not be charged for instance usage while your instance is stopped. EBS volume storage is charged at standard rates. You can cancel your bid at any time to terminate stopped instances. This feature is only available for instances with an Amazon EBS volume as their root device.

You can learn more about this feature by reading the AWS Blog and Spot Instance Interruptions documentation.