if you are curious why the stopped instance has been mirrored to another instance (or, auto scaled), it’s probably the instance is run under some autoscaling policy enabling it to do so
check the running instance’s autoscaling policy first
then go to the page, which lists your autoscaling policies
click the checkbox of the scaling policy (say its name is scale1)
click Details pane and click Edit button
in Suspended Processes, leave it only with Terminate – for further information, you should check the life cycle of ec2 instances
don’t forget to click save
go suspending the instance(s) again
and yes, the stopped instance can go back to Start status
the need for stopping instances (and keep ‘em) may be due to experiments and our tight budgets …
downsides:
the instance’s public IP changes under my experiment
in the lifecycle illustration, it seems like we can only suspend Terminate if the underlying AMI is EBS-backed – might be some problem??