Let’s say you have an instance that has several applications that take too long to boot up, but you need to bring down the instance and not wait for those to applications to start back up when you need them to. Well you’re in luck! That’s where hibernate comes in you save the memory state of an instance to your EBS, elastic block storage, which is required and when the machine comes up it’s as if nothing ever happened and you don’t need to bring your applications back up! There are a few caveats, for example you cannot have an instance hibernated for more than 60 days, you cannot have more than 150 GB of RAM on the instance, it must be encrypted, and you must have sufficient storage to save the memory state. I will note you can encrypt your EBS storage when you first create your instance in the advanced storage settings.