Choosing and provisioning instances that suit your operational needs at any time is one of cloud computing’s highlights – adding a new server is as easy as following a simple wizard. As a by-product of this flexibility, many times one gets to a number of compute instances growing very fast, much faster than expected. Sometimes it becomes difficult to keep track of all the instances that you have launched and identify those that are just sitting around without doing anything.

Leaving active instances idle for a long time means you are paying but not using, it is like leaving a room with the lights on.

Check out the related cloud insight: Compute Footprint Utilization (Idle)

Keywords: idle instances, amazon aws instances, cloud computing.