1.9. Terminate Instances

Terminating an EC2 compute instance means that the instance is completely destroyed and the hardware resources are returned to the pool. In contrast, stopping an instance (which is possible for some machine images) merely shuts down the processes running on the instance, preserving any data and software on the instance.

You can use either of the following approaches to terminate instances on Amazon EC2:

The cleanest way to terminate an individual compute instance is to use the fabric:container-delete console command, as follows:

The advantage of this command is that all of the corresponding entries in the Fabric Registry are cleaned up, before the container's compute instance is terminated.

You can quickly terminate all of your compute instances on the EC2 cloud using the jclouds:node-destroy-all command, as follows: