Behavior of Spot Instance interruptions - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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Behavior of Spot Instance interruptions

When you create a Spot request, you can specify the interruption behavior. The following are the possible interruption behaviors:

The default behavior is that Amazon EC2 terminates Spot Instances when they are interrupted.

Stop interrupted Spot Instances

You can specify that Amazon EC2 stops your Spot Instances when they are interrupted. The Spot Instance request type must be persistent. You can't specify a launch group in the Spot Instance request. For EC2 Fleet or Spot Fleet, the request type must be maintain.

Considerations

  • Only Amazon EC2 can restart an interrupted stopped Spot Instance.

  • For a Spot Instance launched by a persistent Spot Instance request: Amazon EC2 restarts the stopped instance when capacity is available in the same Availability Zone and for the same instance type as the stopped instance (the same launch specification must be used).

  • While a Spot Instance is stopped, you can modify some of its instance attributes, but not the instance type. If you detach or delete an EBS volume, it is not attached when the Spot Instance is started. If you detach the root volume and Amazon EC2 attempts to start the Spot Instance, the instance will fail to start and Amazon EC2 will terminate the stopped instance.

  • You can terminate a Spot Instance while it is stopped.

  • If you cancel a Spot Instance request, an EC2 Fleet, or a Spot Fleet, Amazon EC2 terminates any associated Spot Instances that are stopped.

  • While an interrupted Spot Instance is stopped, you are charged only for the EBS volumes, which are preserved. With EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet, if you have many stopped instances, you can exceed the limit on the number of EBS volumes for your account. For more information about how you're charged when a Spot Instance is interrupted, see Billing for interrupted Spot Instances.

  • Make sure that you are familiar with the implications of stopping an instance. For information about what happens when an instance is stopped, see Differences between instance states.

Hibernate interrupted Spot Instances

You can specify that Amazon EC2 hibernates your Spot Instances when they are interrupted. For more information, see Hibernate your Amazon EC2 instance.

Amazon EC2 now offers the same hibernation experience for Spot Instances as is currently available for On-Demand Instances. It offers more extensive support, where the following is now supported for Spot Instance hibernation:

Terminate interrupted Spot Instances

When Amazon EC2 interrupts a Spot Instance, it terminates the instance by default, unless you specify a different interruption behavior, such as stop or hibernate. For more information, see Terminate Amazon EC2 instances.