How do I stop the meter on an EC2 instance?

[brooksambrose]

If a job is complete or if we know that we need to press pause on an instance, what are our options for stopping the meter? Do we have to shut it down entirely, or is there a pause button?

[aculich]

AWS uses the following terms to describe the actions for controlling the state of an instance: start, stop, reboot, terminate.

The closest equivalent to a pause button is the stop action which is only available for EBS-backed instances (as opposed to instance store-backed instances). When an EBS-backed instance is in the stopped state the documentation says: "You stop incurring charges for an instance as soon as its state changes to stopping. Each time an instance transitions from stopped to pending, we start a new instance billing hour."

The full lifecycle is shown in the diagram below:

[brooksambrose]

Awesome thank you! This is very helpful. Also begs the question, what does EBS-backed mean? Is this a pay-to-park data storage option?

[stivc]

EBS means persistent disk storage, so if you shut the system down you can boot it up again and any changes made to your EBS/disk will still be there. Like you would expect from a normal hard-drive. I believe it is the default for everyone, it certainly is for me.
If you know what you are doing you can use volatile storage instead. In this case you need to save any useful results or information somewhere else before the system shuts down.
I think folks that use large-scale AWS develop their own custom AMIs and launch them with volatile disk. They want the reliability of starting instances from a fixed known state each and every time.

[stivc]

I'm calling it 'volatile' but Amazon calls it the "instance store". Aaron is using the correct term.