Terminate Amazon EC2 instances

You can delete your instance when you no longer need it. This is referred to as terminating your instance. As soon as the state of an instance changes to shutting-down or terminated, you stop incurring charges for that instance.

You can't connect to or start an instance after you've terminated it. However, you can launch additional instances using the same AMI. If you'd rather stop or hibernate an instance, see Stop and start Amazon EC2 instances or Hibernate your Amazon EC2 instance. For more information, see Differences between instance states.

Contents

• How instance termination works
• Terminate an instance
• Troubleshoot instance termination
• Enable termination protection
• Change the instance initiated shutdown behavior
• Preserve data when an instance is terminated

Terminate an instance

You can terminate an instance at any time.

Console

To terminate an instance using the console

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

3. Select the instance, and choose Instance state, Terminate (delete) instance.

4. Choose Terminate (delete) when prompted for confirmation.

5. After you terminate an instance, it remains visible for a short while, with a state of terminated.

   If termination fails or if a terminated instance is visible for more than a few hours, see Terminated instance still displayed.

Command line

To terminate an instance using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Access Amazon EC2.

• terminate-instances (AWS CLI)

• Remove-EC2Instance (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Troubleshoot instance termination

The requester must have permission to call ec2:TerminateInstances. For more information, see Example policies to work with instances.

If you terminate your instance and another instance starts, most likely you have configured automatic scaling through a feature like EC2 Fleet or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. For more information, see Instances automatically launched or terminated.

You can't terminate an instance if termination protection is turned on. For more information, see termination protection.

If your instance is in the shutting-down state for longer than usual, it should be cleaned up (terminated) by automated processes within the Amazon EC2 service. For more information, see Delayed instance termination.