Best practices for AWS cost optimization
Unused EBS Volumes
- Login to the AWS Management Console
- In the navigation panel, under Elastic Block Store, click Volumes.
- To identify any unattached EBS volumes, check their status under State column. If the status is available, the volume is not attached to an EC2 instance and can be safely deleted.
- Select the unused EBS volume -> click on Actions -> Delete volume
- Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat the process for the other regions.
- Log off the AWS Management console.
Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances
- Sign in to the AWS Management Console
- In the left navigation panel, under INSTANCES section, choose Instances.
- Select the EC2 instance that you want to examine.
- Select the Monitoring tab from the dashboard bottom panel.
- Within the CloudWatch metrics section, perform the following actions:
- Click on the CPU Utilization (Percent) usage graph thumbnail to open the instance CPU usage details box. Inside the CloudWatch Monitoring Details dialog box, set the following parameters:
- From the Statistic dropdown list, select Average.
- From the Time Range list, select Last 1 Week.
- From the Period dropdown list, select 1 Hour.
- Once the monitoring data is loaded, verify the instance CPU usage for the last 7 days. If the average usage (percent) has been less than 2%, e.g. , the selected EC2 instance qualifies as candidate for an idle instance. Click Close to return to the dashboard.
- Decide if you wish to terminate (delete) the EC2 instance.
- To terminate the EC2 instance -> from Actions -> select Instance State -> select Terminate -> choose Yes, Terminate
- Change the AWS region from the navigation bar and repeat the process for the other regions.
- Log off the AWS Management console.