Learn how to enable Delete on termination in EBS. Our AWS Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Enable Delete on termination in EBS | Guide

Did you know that the “Delete on Termination” setting in Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) decides if the associated EBS volumes are automatically deleted when the EC2 instance to which they are attached is terminated?

In other words, this setting offers us control over the lifecycle of our EBS volumes when the EC2 instance they are attached to is terminated.

Let’s take a look at how “Delete on Termination” works:

• Enabled (Default Setting):

  When we launch an EC2 instance, the default setting for EBS volumes is “Delete on Termination: Enabled.”

  In other words, any EBS volumes attached to the instance will be automatically deleted when the instance is terminated. Hence we are not charged for the storage after the instance is no longer in use.

  This is preferred for temporary or transient instances where the data on the EBS volumes is disposable or can be easily recreated.
• Disabled:

  If we disable the setting for an EBS volume, it means that the volume will persist even after the associated EC2 instance is terminated. The data on the EBS volume remains intact. Furthermore, we can attach it to another EC2 instance later.

  This comes in handy when we retain data on the EBS volume.

  We can disable the setting for volumes that serve as data storage, where the data needs to persist beyond the lifespan of individual EC2 instances.

How to enable “Delete on Termination”

Using the AWS Management Console:

1. To begin with, head to the EC2 dashboard in the AWS Management Console.
2. Then, choose the EC2 instance to which the EBS volume is attached.
3. Next, scroll down to the “Block devices” section and find the EBS volume.
4. After that, click the volume to select it.
5. Furthermore, go to the Actions menu and choose Modify Attachment to enable or disable “Delete on Termination.”

Using the AWS CLI:

We can enable “Delete on Termination,” via AWS CLI as seen below:

aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute --instance-id OUR_INSTANCE_ID --block-device-mappings "[{\"DeviceName\":\"/dev/sda1\",\"Ebs\":{\"DeleteOnTermination\":true}}]"


Similarly, we can disable the setting by changing true to false in the above command.

Using the AWS SDKs and APIs:

Additionally, we can use AWS SDKs or direct API calls to modify the attribute of an EC2 instance to enable or disable “Delete on Termination.”

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Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to enable Delete on termination in EBS.