Reboot your instance

An instance reboot is equivalent to an operating system reboot. In most cases, it takes only a few minutes to reboot your instance. When you reboot an instance, it keeps its public DNS name (IPv4), private and public IPv4 address, IPv6 address (if applicable), and any data on its instance store volumes.

Rebooting an instance doesn't start a new instance billing period (with a minimum one-minute charge), unlike stopping and starting your instance.

We might schedule your instance for a reboot for necessary maintenance, such as to apply updates that require a reboot. No action is required on your part; we recommend that you wait for the reboot to occur within its scheduled window. For more information, see Scheduled events for your instances.

We recommend that you use the Amazon EC2 console, a command line tool, or the Amazon EC2 API to reboot your instance instead of running the operating system reboot command from your instance. If you use the Amazon EC2 console, a command line tool, or the Amazon EC2 API to reboot your instance, we perform a hard reboot if the instance does not cleanly shut down within a few minutes. If you use AWS CloudTrail, then using Amazon EC2 to reboot your instance also creates an API record of when your instance was rebooted.

New console

To reboot 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, Reboot instance.

   Alternatively, select the instance and choose Actions, Manage instance state. In the screen that opens, choose Reboot, and then Change state.

4. Choose Reboot when prompted for confirmation.

   The instance remains in the running state.

Old console

To reboot 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 Actions, Instance State, Reboot.

4. Choose Yes, Reboot when prompted for confirmation.

   The instance remains in the running state.

To reboot 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.

• reboot-instances (AWS CLI)

• Restart-EC2Instance (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

To run a controlled fault injection experiment

You can use AWS Fault Injection Simulator to test how your application responds when your instance is rebooted. For more information, see the AWS Fault Injection Simulator User Guide.