Posted On: Sep 9, 2021

Amazon EC2 now supports Hibernation for On-Demand Nitro-based instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 8, CentOS version 8, and Fedora version 34 onwards. 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.

For RHEL version 8, CentOS version 8, and Fedora version 34 onwards, Hibernation is supported for On-Demand Instances running on Nitro-based instances (C5, C5d, M5, M5a, M5ad, M5d, R5, R5a, R5ad, R5d, T3, and T3a) with up to 150 GB of RAM. Nitro-based instances are supported by a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor enabling faster innovation and enhanced security.

This feature is available through Amazon CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon SDKs, Amazon Tools for Powershell, or the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more about hibernation, see our FAQs, technical documentation, and blog.