All checks
Medium
Stopped EC2 instances should be removed after a specified time period
Flags EC2 instances stopped for more than 30 days. A stopped instance gets no patches, so it rejoins the network carrying every vulnerability fixed while it was down. If it is still needed, starting it to patch and stopping it again restarts the 30 days.
- service
- EC2
- severity
- Medium
- scope
- evaluated in every region
How to fix it
- Can't be undone: Termination cannot be undone and deletes every attached EBS volume set to delete on termination (a root volume is by default), so snapshot what you still need first.
- Affects another check: An Elastic IP address on the instance stays allocated after termination, so release it too or EC2.12 reports it as unused.
In the console
EC2 → Instances → the instance → Instance state → Terminate (delete) instance
With the AWS CLI
aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids <instance-id> --region <region>See which of your accounts this check is failing on.
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