[pluies]

It's definitely news to me!

Intuitively, I would have expected AWS to send back the EBS volume backing a powered-off machine into the Whatever Long-Term Storage Is Behind EBS, and therefore start-up time to be ~identical to a fresh start as the steps would be the same: retrieve data from long-term storage into a readable EBS volume, start VM etc.

It's very interesting that it is not the case, and that keeping the EBS volume around after a first boot makes a second boot so much faster.

[dylan604]

If that were the case, then there would be absolutely no benefit from having a stop vs terminate. Unless you've written data to the EBS volume, but in these cases where the boot time is critical most of them are some sort of read-only volume anyways. The fact that an EC2 can be stopped or terminated should immediately suggest speed might be a difference in reaching the running state. In the EBS docs, it clearly states that if you keep an EBS volume around either attached to a stopped EC2 or detached and left in your pool of volumes, you will be charged for that volume.