Amazon EC2 now supports skipping the operating system shutdown when stopping or terminating instances

Starting today, Amazon EC2 gives customers the option to skip the graceful operating system (OS) shutdown during an instance stop or terminate. Previously, customers waited by default for a graceful OS shutdown attempt when stopping or terminating their instances. Customers can now skip the graceful operating system shutdown attempt during stop or terminate for a faster application recovery when instance data preservation is not critical. For example, customers with high-availability clusters where instance data is replicated elsewhere can skip the graceful OS shutdown during failover, enabling faster instance state transitions. Customers can enable the option to skip the graceful OS shutdown when stopping or terminating instances using the AWS CLI or EC2 Console. To learn more, please refer to our documentation here for StopInstances and here for TerminateInstances.