EBS Optimization 101: Tackling the Usual Suspects

When it comes to optimizing AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) costs, organizations often focus on a set of proven, foundational strategies. As a FinOps expert, I’ve seen many businesses jump into these optimizations with enthusiasm. And for good reason—they're practical, effective, and deliver tangible savings without much complexity.

In this post, I’ll guide you through these essential EBS optimization strategies that every organization should have in their toolkit.

The Usual Suspects in EBS Optimization

When it comes to reducing EBS costs, here are the best practices organizations can’t afford to overlook:

1. Deleting Unattached Volumes
   It's surprising how often unattached volumes are left idle, quietly accumulating unnecessary costs. Deleting these volumes is one of the fastest ways to save. Here's how: 

• For existing unattached volumes, assess the potential future value of the data. If they contain important information, create a snapshot to preserve it. Then proceed with deletion. 
• To prevent future accumulation of unattached volumes, enable 'Delete on Termination' during volume creation for non-critical data. This ensures volumes are automatically deleted when no longer needed.
• Implement an automated process to identify and flag unattached volumes after a specified period. This serves as a safety measure to catch any volumes that might be overlooked.
  
  

2. Managing Attached Volumes to Stopped EC2 Instances
   Similar to unattached volumes, EBS volumes attached to stopped instances can accumulate unnoticed costs. While you don't pay for stopped machines (instances), you continue to incur charges for the EBS volumes attached to them. These volumes are often overlooked because their state remains 'attached' or 'in use', even when they're not active. To effectively manage these costs:

• Just like with existing unattached volumes, if the data is critical make sure you take a snapshot to preserve it. After verifying the snapshot, delete the volume. 

• Implement an automatic review process: Set up alerts and automated processes to notify you when instances have been stopped for an extended period of time. These alerts can also help identify unattached volumes.
  
  

3. Leveraging Disk Types
   By matching your storage type to your workload's specific needs, you can achieve substantial savings without compromising performance. For example, upgrading from gp2 to gp3 is a straightforward way to reduce costs and improve performance for general-purpose use cases. However, for workloads that don't demand high IOPS or low-latency access, alternatives like Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) or Cold HDD (sc1) volumes may be more cost-effective. For more insights, check out this resource: The 6 different types of EBS volumes: Which one is right for you?
   
   
4. Optimizing IOPS
   For performance-critical applications, EBS volumes can be provisioned with high IOPS. However, like any other service, over-provisioning can lead to unnecessary expenses. By monitoring your actual usage patterns, you can right-size your IOPS to match the true needs of your applications.
   
   
5. Managing Snapshots
   Snapshots are a powerful feature of EBS, offering data redundancy and cost effective alternatives to backup your EBS volumes. But, unmanaged snapshots can accumulate over time, leading to significant storage costs. Implementing a snapshot lifecycle policy is an effective way to manage these costs. By automatically deleting outdated snapshots or transitioning them to cheaper storage tiers like EBS Snapshots Archive or Glacier, you can keep your snapshot costs under control. This can be done without compromising on data protection.

Beyond the Basics: Your Next Step

By focusing on the fundamentals—deleting unused volumes, managing attached instances, selecting the right disk types, optimizing IOPS, and managing snapshots—you can achieve substantial savings with relatively straightforward steps. These strategies form the backbone of any cost-effective EBS management plan.

But what do you do when you want to level up your savings and efficiency? At this point, your next step is considering more complex optimization strategies such as right-sizing your EBS volumes. You can read all about it here. 

Ready to optimize your EBS setup? Get in touch with our team of experts and start saving today.

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