Why Am I Being Charged for Stopped EC2 Instances?
Question
Your company currently has 5 EC2 Instances that use Instance store volumes.
The Instances have been placed in the stopped state for a week now.
But you notice that you are still being charged for AWS EC2 service.
Which of the following could be a possible reason for this?
Answers
Explanations
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A. B. C. D.Answer - D.
The AWS documentation mentions the following on Elastic IP addresses.
An Elastic IP address doesn't incur charges as long as the following conditions are true:
· The Elastic IP address is associated with an Amazon EC2 instance.
· The instance associated with the Elastic IP address is running.
· The instance has only one Elastic IP address attached to it.
If you've stopped or terminated an EC2 instance with an associated Elastic IP address and you don't need that Elastic IP address any more, consider disassociating or releasing the Elastic IP address.
Hence the most feasible reason will be that there were Elastic IP's associated with these instances.
For more information, please visit the below URL:
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/elastic-ip-charges/The correct answer is A: Instances in stopped state still incur a charge within AWS.
When an EC2 Instance is stopped, you will still be charged for the instance storage, EBS volumes, and Elastic IPs associated with the instance. The reason for this is that the underlying infrastructure resources required to support the instance are still allocated, even though the instance is not running.
If your EC2 Instances are using instance store volumes, which are ephemeral storage that is physically attached to the host computer that is running the instance, then you will still be charged for this storage while the instance is stopped. This is because the data stored on the instance store volumes will be lost if the instance is terminated, so the storage must be kept available for the instance if it is started again.
If you had been using EBS volumes instead of instance store volumes, then you would still be charged for the storage even if the instance was terminated, because EBS volumes persist independently of the instance. However, since the question specifies that the instances are using instance store volumes, this is not the reason for the charges.
Elastic IPs are associated with your AWS account, not with individual instances, so even if you have Elastic IPs associated with the instances, they would not be the cause of the charges.
In summary, if you have EC2 Instances using instance store volumes, you will be charged for the storage even when the instances are stopped.
