AWS: Stopping an Instance vs. Terminating an instance

[TheoFranquet]

Hi,

Could someone clarify the difference between the two actions, and whether or not stopping an instance stops withdrawing money from my account (in the case of a c4.8xlarge).

Thanks

[lsc1234582]

Stopping an instance is shutting it down; terminating an instance destroys it altogether. You won't be billed for a stopped instance.

[guigzzz]

From what I understand, if we had normal AWS accounts we would be billed (at least some) even for a stopped instance as it still reserves some disk space. However with AWS educate accounts, it seems we have 30GB of free EBS disk space to use, which means that we can have a number of stopped instances at a time. Could anyone confirm that what I have said is true.

[m8pple]

The responses but @lsc1234582 and @guigzzz are correct, though to elaborate
a little:

Usually you would stop an instance if there is some kind of instance configuration or
data on the instance that you want to preserve. For example, if you are currently
debugging something but then have to go to a lecture, or sleep, or something else,
you might want to stop the instance now, then restart it again tomorrow. It saves
you the hassle of doing any configuration steps and cloning your work again.

Whenever you don't expect to use an instance again soon (e.g. within a day), it
is often better to terminate it. This has two benefits:

• You won't be charged for any storage (though see below)
• It forces you to transfer any data back and commit+push any changes you made
  If you come back to an instance after a week, it is very unlikely you remember exactly
  what is on it, so you can spend ages trying to resynchronise things. Better to
  make a conscious decision of what data you need to save while you still
  remember what the contents of the instance are, and whether they are important.

@guigzzz is correct that storage is billable - they currently charge $0.12 per GB-month
for EBS (Elastic Block Storage). So an 8GB instance costs ~$0.92 per month. But as
they point out, there is 30GB free EBS storage for you.

That 30GB is actually not part of AWS Educate, it actually applies to everyone in the
first 12 months of using AWS. You can also
run a t2.micro instance permanently for the rest of the year for free if you want,
though watch out for the 15GB free data transfer limit.