Oracle IaaS - Stop an instance

When working with the Oracle Compute Cloud Service, or IaaS, there are a couple of things to remember when you want to stop or delete a machine (instance). In essence you cannot stop or delete instance. Instances are seen as “temporary” results of the execution of a orchestration and not an object of itself.

The Oracle documentation explains this subject around an orchestration in the following wording:

“When you start an orchestration, the objects defined in it are created, and when you stop an orchestration, those objects are deleted. However, stopping an orchestration doesn’t cause the orchestration itself to be deleted. After you stop an orchestration, the orchestration continues to be listed on the Orchestrations page, where its status is shown as Stopped. You can still start, view, or download the orchestration. When you delete an orchestration, however, it’s no longer listed on the Orchestrations page, and you can’t perform any action on it.”

In previous releases of the Oracle Compute Cloud Service you could delete a instance. In the screenshot below you can see the option “delete” is still available. This will stay available for all machines created in previous releases. The reason for this is that for those machines no orchestration will be available on the orchestration tab.

For instances that have been created at later versions you will not find the delete button, you can simply not stop an instance, you will have to stop the orchestration instead. The successful execution of an orchestration results in an instance, this means that the orchestration is controlling all resulting products, in our case an IaaS instance.

If you have an instance running which is the result of executing the orchestration TESTBOX08_instance and you want to stop that resulting instance you will not have the option to stop the instance TESTBOX08. You will have the TESTBOX08_instance under your “Orchestration” tab in the Oracle cloud. You will however have the option to stop the TESTBOX08_instance orchestration.

After you have executed the stop command on the orchestration you will see that the options you have changed. You now have the option to resize and you have the option to delete the orchestration.

At the same time you will see that your instance is now also no longer available under your instance tab.

If you want to start, or rather create, your instance again you will have the option in your stopped orchestration to start it again. This will result in running the orchestration again and it will create your instance again.

Conclusion:
In case you want to stop and/or delete a running instance on the Oracle Compute Cloud Service you will not have the option to do so. You will have to understand the concept that an instance is the result of the execution of a orchestration and you will have to use the orchestration as the source of the instance to stop the resulting instance instead of going directly to the end product (the instance)