Terminate Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Terminate an instance

Terminate Amazon EC2 instances

You can delete your instance when you no longer need it. This is referred to as terminating your instance. As soon as the state of an instance changes to shutting-down or terminated, you stop incurring charges for that instance.

You can't connect to or start an instance after you've terminated it. However, you can launch additional instances using the same AMI. If you'd rather stop or hibernate an instance, see Stop and start Amazon EC2 instances or Hibernate your Amazon EC2 instance. For more information, see Differences between reboot, stop, hibernate, and terminate.

Contents

Terminate an instance

You can terminate an instance at any time.

Console
To terminate 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, Terminate instance.

  4. Choose Terminate when prompted for confirmation.

  5. After you terminate an instance, it remains visible for a short while, with a state of terminated.

    If termination fails or if a terminated instance is visible for more than a few hours, see Terminated instance still displayed.

Command line
To terminate 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.