Enable Hibernation on EC2 Instances when launching with an AMI without an Encrypted EBS Snapshot

Hibernating your Amazon EC2 Instances just got easier. In a single run-instances API call, you can now launch encrypted Amazon EBS-backed EC2 instances from an unencrypted AMI and also enable Hibernation at the same time. You no longer have to create an encrypted copy of your Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as an additional step before launching the instance.

Hibernation requires an EC2 instance be an encrypted EBS-backed instance. This ensures protection of sensitive contents in memory (RAM) as they get copied to the EBS upon hibernation. Previously, to launch an EC2 instance backed by encrypted EBS volume, you had to use AMI with encrypted EBS snapshot. If you did not have the encrypted AMI, you followed a multi-step process in which you maintained a separate, encrypted copy of the AMI in your account in order to launch instances with encrypted volumes. You can now skip this extra step.

Hibernation is available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances running on freshly launched M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5 instances running Amazon Linux (1). You can enable hibernation for your EBS-backed instances at launch. You can then hibernate and resume your EBS-backed EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console, or though the AWS SDK and CLI using the existing stop-instances and start-instances commands.

EC2 Instance Hibernation is available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and EU (Frankfurt, London, Ireland, Paris) Regions.

To learn more about launching encrypted EBS-backed instances from unencrypted AMIs, visit this blog. This new feature is also available via EC2 Launch Templates if you are using them to provision EC2 instances. To learn more about hibernation, visit this blog, product FAQs or our technical documentation.