I recently had some AWS instances take longer than normal to start where they sat in the PENDING state. Once the launch timeout was reached they were terminated.

In the log files, I saw entries for "Startup timeout ... instance status: PENDING", "instance failed to launch", and "Terminated EC2 instance".

I would like to have the instance stopped and started instead of terminated when the launch timeout is reached and the instance state is PENDING. Usually a stop and start resolves these hung / slow PENDING state instances.

Note, I'm not using spot instances.