Terminating your instances

Cloud environments are designed to be dynamic and this implies that cloud instances are being spun up and terminated as required. Terminating a cloud instance is easy, but it is equally important to understand some basic concepts of cloud instances.

Cloud instances such as the instance we have used are not persistent. This means that the data and work you do on that instance only exists for the time that it is running. A cloud instance can be rebooted, but once it has been terminated, all data is lost.

Tip

To ensure no loss of data, the OpenStack Block Storage service Cinder provides a persistent data store functionality that allows you to attach a volume to it that doesn’t get destroyed on termination. It allows you to attach it to running instances. A volume is like a USB drive attached to your instance. For more information, go to Chapter 8, Cinder – OpenStack Block Storage.

How to do it...

From our Ubuntu machine, list the running instances to identify the instance...