New Amazon EC2 Feature: Skip Graceful OS Shutdown for Faster Recovery

Starting today, AWS EC2 allows customers to skip the graceful operating system (OS) shutdown during an instance stop or terminate operation.

Previously, EC2 would attempt a graceful shutdown of the OS, which could introduce delays in high-availability environments. With this update, customers can now:

✅ Accelerate failovers and recovery in HA clusters
✅ Reduce downtime when instance data isn't critical
✅ Skip OS shutdown gracefully via CLI or EC2 Console

This is especially useful for applications with stateless workloads or replicated data where stopping gracefully isn’t essential.

🗺️ Available across all commercial AWS regions and GovCloud.

📖 Learn more:
👉 StopInstances
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-stop-methods.html
👉 TerminateInstances
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-terminate-methods.html