It’s summer cleaning season!
Time to declutter, organize, and tidy up – both at home and in your cloud environment.
Let us share actionable tips to help you “summer clean” your cloud accounts and reduce costs, put some order into your cloud environments and avoid paying for resources you don’t need. Tidy Up
CloudWatch Logs
Tips on tidying up CloudWatch/Azure Monitor Logs:
Apply retention policies to log groups – This lets you automatically delete logs older than a set time period. Many log groups default to never expiring logs, so adding policies can quickly clean up unneeded data.
Use the new (AWS) CloudWatch Infrequent Access storage tier – This cheaper tier is ideal for log data not frequently accessed. You can enable it on new log groups going forward.
Reduce metrics pulled with GetMetricData (AWS)- If you don’t need metrics at a high granularity anymore, reduce the polling frequency to pull less data.
Use CloudWatch Insights queries against log group metadata to identify log groups that haven’t been growing or accessed recently. These may be candidates to delete or reduce retention on.
Remove Zombie Storage Buckets
Tips on tidying up S3/Blob buckets:
Find and remove “zombie” S3 / Blob buckets – These are buckets not accessed recently that are needlessly accumulating storage charges.
Implement S3 Intelligent Tiering / Storage Cool Tiering– This can automatically move data between tiers based on access patterns, optimizing costs.
Delete incomplete multi-part uploads – When files are uploaded to S3 / Blob in parts, leftover incomplete uploads can take up space. Deleting them frees up storage.
To identify zombie storage buckets, we suggest looking at your bucket list and storage metrics to find any surprises. Buckets that are very large or continuing to grow steadily may warrant a deeper look.
Clean Up Unused EBS Snapshots / Blob Storage
Understand EBS snapshot billing – You only pay for unique blocks captured in a snapshot, not empty space.
Use APIs to gather metadata like snapshot age and description – This can help identify cleanup targets.
Ensure snapshots match intended retention policies – Delete ones out of compliance.
Since billing is based on unique blocks captured, snapshots of empty volumes incur no charges. Look at the ratio of EBS to snapshot billing, as high snapshot costs may indicate old, unused snapshots piling up.
Prioritize Your Cleanup
Create a simple “high five” report with top idle resources. Highlight just the top 5 idle resources in key categories like EC2/AVM, RDS/SQL Db, and EBS/Blob:
Annualize the potential savings – Show the projected yearly savings from cleaning each item up.
Follow up to ensure remediation – Actually verify the resources were deleted or not billing anymore.
Shut down idle DB instances – Trusted Advisor can help identify instances not connected to recently.
Rightsize multi-AZ for non-production – Non-prod may not need redundant standby instances.
Consider using other processors – Arm-based Graviton chips can save substantially on DB instances.
This approach gives you a short, digestible list to act on, rather than an overwhelming full report. It focuses on idle resources that are strong candidates for easy, quick savings. Following up afterward ensures the cleanup stuck and those savings will be realized.
Reach out to us if you need any help optimizing costs.
Wishing you happy summer savings!
