Stale resources can become a management nightmare in cloud environments. One of the important aspects of the economics of a pay-per-use model is the “use” – pay for what you use and don’t pay for what you don’t use. The details of what “use” is makes things a bit more complicated than they seem.

For example, EBS Volumes are charged for their provisioned storage, regardless of being attached to an EC2 instance.  In this case, the best practice is to keep only those volumes that will be needed in the future. Keeping volumes you don’t plan to use in the future, or those you just forgot you have, may contribute to unexpectedly high bills. Even more important than just the cost of these, volumes piling up without reference becomes a management overhead when you want to track them, and even a risk, in case you inadvertently pick the wrong volume to use with out-of-data data or code. This mistake is so common and goes beyond just EBS volumes. EC2 instances can inadvertently run and interfere with your operations even in production. Out-of-date AIMs can be wrongly used to provision new instances, although containing old versions of you application. EBS volumes can be created from the wrong out-of-date snapshot…I think you got the idea…

Check out some of our related insights:

• Unused EBS volumes found
• Stopped Servers Found

Keywords: stale resources, cloud environment, EBS volumes, EC2 instance, out of date AIM.