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Note: AWS has supported this for many years: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-y

Note: AWS has supported this for many years: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst... I do wonder how big the use case for suspend/hibernate is in practice. Are there that many services that (a) see infrequent use that justifies this cost reduction and (b) can't just be booted fresh when needed. I could see if there's a lot of compute-intensive data cached, but this could also just be stored in a disk-persistent cache.

bradhe 4y ago
It’s a useful feature in some cases for certain stateful workloads (e.g. cloud-based workstations) but it’s almost always 100% better architecturally to develop systems that can just be thrown away and rebuilt vs needing to preserve state.
- ericpauley 4y ago
  True. We do a fair bit of cloud-based dev environments and I’d be worried about risks from tasks getting paused/resumed that aren’t well-designed for it. In theory this could cause undesirable outcomes but it’s probably not an issue in practice.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
I've used it extensively for hosting the heavily-modded Minecraft servers we play with. Those things can take easily 5-10 minutes to boot up fresh, as opposed to the very quick resume.
outworlder 4y ago
> Note: AWS has supported this for many years: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst... We have been using GCP hibernation since 2018 too, but it was alpha back then. The AWS version also had some limitations (it only supposed Amazon Linux at the time) - current prerequisites here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hibernating-prerequisites.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hibernat... We have hundreds of developer K8s clusters that get used during a normal workday and get shutdown later. Because there are many services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume where they started off within a couple of minutes. During development it's often the case that one may be doing experiments and changing the current state, so preserving everything is a plus. If, as it was often the case when it was alpha, hibernation failed, then the normal startup procedure would take place. We don't use it in production but I don't think it's inconceivable that there are other use-cases where preserving state could shave time in getting resources ready.
- mayank 4y ago
  > Because there are many services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume where they started off within a couple of minutes. This is exactly what we use hibernation for in conjunction with EC2 Warm Pools -- fast autoscaling of services that have long boot times. There's an argument to be made that fixing slow boots should be the "correct" solution, but in large enough organizations, hibernated instances are a convenient workaround to buy you some time to navigate the organizational dynamics (and technical debt) that lead to the slow boot times in the first place.
mschuster91 4y ago
At work we have this for stablediffusion and similar servers, I think one runs at .5€/h or more. Automatic start and stop outside of office working hours. It even makes sense if you have on-prem bare metal, with electricity prices being as insane as they are, you'll notice the effect pretty much immediately.
winrid 4y ago
I use it for clusters of machines with largish amounts of state on local SSDs. Run analysis on big cluster of dozens i3 instances, then hibernate.
mnahkies 4y ago
I find it pretty useful for my personal account. I have a ci/cd machine that is only useful to have on when I'm actively working on the projects it manages, makes the difference between a few bucks a month and ~$80

bradhe 4y ago

It’s a useful feature in some cases for certain stateful workloads (e.g. cloud-based workstations) but it’s almost always 100% better architecturally to develop systems that can just be thrown away and rebuilt vs needing to preserve state.

ericpauley 4y ago
True. We do a fair bit of cloud-based dev environments and I’d be worried about risks from tasks getting paused/resumed that aren’t well-designed for it. In theory this could cause undesirable outcomes but it’s probably not an issue in practice.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

I've used it extensively for hosting the heavily-modded Minecraft servers we play with. Those things can take easily 5-10 minutes to boot up fresh, as opposed to the very quick resume.

outworlder 4y ago

> Note: AWS has supported this for many years: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst... We have been using GCP hibernation since 2018 too, but it was alpha back then. The AWS version also had some limitations (it only supposed Amazon Linux at the time) - current prerequisites here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hibernating-prerequisites.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hibernat... We have hundreds of developer K8s clusters that get used during a normal workday and get shutdown later. Because there are many services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume where they started off within a couple of minutes. During development it's often the case that one may be doing experiments and changing the current state, so preserving everything is a plus. If, as it was often the case when it was alpha, hibernation failed, then the normal startup procedure would take place. We don't use it in production but I don't think it's inconceivable that there are other use-cases where preserving state could shave time in getting resources ready.

mayank 4y ago
> Because there are many services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume where they started off within a couple of minutes. This is exactly what we use hibernation for in conjunction with EC2 Warm Pools -- fast autoscaling of services that have long boot times. There's an argument to be made that fixing slow boots should be the "correct" solution, but in large enough organizations, hibernated instances are a convenient workaround to buy you some time to navigate the organizational dynamics (and technical debt) that lead to the slow boot times in the first place.

mschuster91 4y ago

At work we have this for stablediffusion and similar servers, I think one runs at .5€/h or more. Automatic start and stop outside of office working hours. It even makes sense if you have on-prem bare metal, with electricity prices being as insane as they are, you'll notice the effect pretty much immediately.

winrid 4y ago

I use it for clusters of machines with largish amounts of state on local SSDs. Run analysis on big cluster of dozens i3 instances, then hibernate.

mnahkies 4y ago

I find it pretty useful for my personal account. I have a ci/cd machine that is only useful to have on when I'm actively working on the projects it manages, makes the difference between a few bucks a month and ~$80