EC2 Instance Stuck in Stopping State

Hi Dan

I am sorry to hear about the issue that you've had with your instance. I can see that it is back and running gain now so I assume that the issue has been solved now.

Regards,
awstomas

Yes, we made the instance force stop last night after several hours of letting it try to stop manually. For other people experiencing this issue, if it comes down to it, it might be worth trying to force the instance to stop by going to stop --> yes, forcefully stop.

This isn't really documented anywhere that I have seen but from what I have observed, when your instance takes a long time to stop, it is actually migrating to a new host during this part of its lifecycle. You can aggressively elect to "Force Stop" it and it will still not stop the instance until it has finished doing its thing. It somewhat makes sense from a user-facing perspective too - would you rather it take a long time to shut down, or a long time to start up the next time when it migrates? Although, they could just add a lifecycle state called "Migrating" and simplify it.

It is also common that if you try to migrate an instance by power-cycling it early on, it will take a long time because presumably the underlying host that is failing has many, many other instances than just yours that all need to be migrated off. I do not use dedicated tenancy but maybe someone else could comment on that and whether their migrations are much faster.

Hope this helps someone out.