Delete unassociated AWS EBS volumes to optimize your cloud costs

Cost optimization refers to bringing down cloud expenditure by optimizing your cloud consumption. Any organization, whether big or small does not prefer to spend unnecessarily on cloud resources which ultimately gets wasted. Talking of wasted cloud resources, underutilized or unassociated AWS EBS resources yield no benefit to the users. Managing unused or deleting obsolete resources not only cuts down superfluous costs from your cloud expenses but also helps you make the most out of your resources.

Following certain practices related to your EBS resources can help you in optimizing your cloud spending.

Why you should delete unassociated AWS EBS volumes?

There can be a situation where the user has terminated an EC2 instance, but the user forgets to delete the EBS volume which was associated with that instance. As a result, that particular EBS volume still remains functional and racks up the cloud expenditure. This is one of the most common mistakes users commit leading to unnecessary cost spikes.

How does Centilytics help you in cost optimization?

Centilytics has a dedicated insight for unassociated EBS volumes, that warns you whenever an EBS volume with no associated resource is detected in your cloud infrastructure. This helps you in discarding those unattached EBS volumes and optimize your cloud spending.

Insight Descriptions:

There can be 2 possible scenarios:

Severity	Description
Warning	This indication will be displayed when an EBS volume is not associated with any AWS resource.
OK	This indication will be displayed when the corresponding EBS volume is associated with any AWS resource.

 

Descriptions of further columns are as follows:

1. Account Id: This column shows the respective account ID of the user’s account.
2. Account Name: This column shows the corresponding account name to the user’s account.
3. Region: This column shows the region in which the corresponding EBS volume exists.
4. Identifier: This column shows the unique Volume Id of the snapshot.
5. Availability Zone: This column shows the availability zone in which your volume is currently running.
6. Volume Type: This column shows the type of AWS EBS volume.
7. Size (in GB): This column shows the capacity of the EBS volumes in terms of GB.
8. Potential Monthly Savings (in $): This column shows the potential amount of money that you can save by deleting the respective unassociated EBS volume.
9. Custom Severity Description: This column shows the custom description associated with the EBS volume.

 

Filters applicable:

Filter Name	Description
Account Id	Applying the account Id filter will display all resources for the selected account Id.
Region	Applying the region filter will display all the resources corresponding to the selected region.
Severity	Applying severity filter will display resources according to the selected severity type. Selecting critical will display all instances with critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning and OK severity types.
Resource Tags	Applying resource tags filter will display those resources which have been assigned the selected resource tag. For e.g., A user has tagged some public snapshots by a resource tag named environment. Then selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all those resources tagged by the tag name environment.
Resource Tags Value	Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. – Let’s say a user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has a value say production (environment: production). Hence, the user can view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment:production”. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided.

 

To get an in-depth understanding of Amazon EBS volumes, read here.