Enable termination protection - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Terminate multiple instances with termination protection

Enable termination protection

To prevent your instance from being accidentally terminated, you can enable termination protection for the instance. The DisableApiTermination attribute controls whether the instance can be terminated using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or API. By default, termination protection is disabled for your instance which means that your instance can be terminated using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or API. You can set the value of this attribute when you launch an instance, while the instance is running, or while the instance is stopped (for Amazon EBS backed instances).

The DisableApiTermination attribute doesn't prevent you from terminating an instance by initiating shutdown from the instance (using an operating system command for system shutdown) when the InstanceInitiatedShutdownBehavior attribute is set. For more information, see Change the instance initiated shutdown behavior.

Considerations

  • Enabling termination protection does not prevent AWS from terminating the instance when there is a scheduled event to terminate the instance.

  • Enabling termination protection does not prevent Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling from terminating an instance when the instance is unhealthy or during scale-in events. You can control whether an Auto Scaling group can terminate a particular instance when scaling using instance scale-in protection. You can control whether an Auto Scaling group can terminate unhealthy instances by suspending the ReplaceUnhealthy scaling process.

  • You can't enable termination protection for Spot Instances.

To enable termination protection for an instance at launch time

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

  2. On the dashboard, choose Launch Instance and follow the directions in the wizard.

  3. On the Configure Instance Details page, select the Enable termination protection check box.

To enable termination protection for a running or stopped instance

  1. Select the instance, and choose Actions, Instance Settings, Change Termination Protection.

  2. Choose Yes, Enable.

To disable termination protection for a running or stopped instance

  1. Select the instance, and choose Actions, Instance Settings, Change Termination Protection.

  2. Choose Yes, Disable.

To enable or disable termination protection 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 multiple instances with termination protection

If you terminate multiple instances across multiple Availability Zones in the same request, and one or more of the specified instances are enabled for termination protection, the request fails with the following results:

  • The specified instances that are in the same Availability Zone as the protected instance are not terminated.

  • The specified instances that are in different Availability Zones, where no other specified instances are protected, are successfully terminated.

Example

Suppose that you have the following four instances across two Availability Zones.

Instance Availability Zone Terminate protection
Instance 1 AZ A Disabled
Instance 2 Disabled
Instance 3 AZ B Enabled
Instance 4 Disabled

If you attempt to terminate all of these instances in the same request, the request reports failure with the following results:

  • Instance 1 and Instance 2 are successfully terminated because neither instance is enabled for termination protection.

  • Instance 3 and Instance 4 fail to terminate because Instance 3 is enabled for termination protection.