100 Days of DevOps — Day 33- On Demand Hibernate

Welcome to Day 33 of 100 Days of DevOps, Focus for today is On Demand Hibernate. This is the new feature released by AWS during reinvent 2018

Why do we need On Demand Hibernate

• EC2 Instance can be up in a matter of a second, but booting OS and Application sometimes take several minutes
• Warming up cache can take several minutes
• Hibernate stores the in-memory state of the instance(along with Private and Elastic IP)
• Pick up exactly where you left off
• Supported instance type(M3, M4, M5, C3, C4, C5, R3, R4, and R5)
• Supported OS(Amazon Linux 1)
• Amazon Linux 2(work in progress), No support for Centos family :(. (Coming soon: Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, along with the SQL Server variants of the Windows AMIs)
• Support for on-demand and reserved instance

How it works

When we instruct instance to hibernate it will write it’s in-memory data to the mounted EBS Volume and then shut down itself

• AMI as well as both EBS Volume need to be encrypted
• Encryption ensures proper protection for sensitive data when it is copied from memory to the EBS volume
• To test this feature, I need to do some reverse engineering

Step1: Create the snapshot of root volume and then use copy option, which enables encryption option.

• Create an AMI out of this volume(which is encrypted by default)

• Choose the supported instance type and make sure hibernation is enabled

• Also, make sure /root has sufficient space to hold in-memory data
• I can use uptime command to see that the instance has not been rebooted, but has continued from where it left off

Reference

Amazon EC2 Now Lets you Pause and Resume Your Workloads

New - Hibernate Your EC2 Instances | Amazon Web Services

Looking forward from you guys to join this journey and spend a minimum an hour every day for the next 100 days on DevOps work and post your progress using any of the below medium.

• Twitter: @100daysofdevops OR @lakhera2015
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/795382630808645/
• Medium: https://medium.com/@devopslearning
• Slack: https://devops-myworld.slack.com/messages/CF41EFG49/
• GitHub Link:https://github.com/100daysofdevops