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I have a cluster of i2.2xlarge instances that I use to run performance tests. These are quite costly to run and I'd like to stop them when they are not in use. Unfortunately, the ephemeral storage on these instances does not survive the stop/start cycle. I am looking for a way to "snapshot" these instances, including all data on all volumes and then be able to bring them back to life when I need them.

Naively, I tried creating AMIs for each instance, but that does not seem to capture the storage volumes, so I can't even launch an instance from the AMI.

I would appreciate any pointers in the right direction.

user14018
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This is not possible. AWS makes it brutally clear that Ephemeral storage is indeed ephemeral, and should not be used for anything that requires durability.

You may consider that a better option would be for you to re-work things so that you can programmatically deploy and configure your servers as needed. Once you have that sorted out, you can use EC2 Spot Instances for great cost savings over on-demand instances.

EEAA
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