EBS Cost Cutting Playbook

  1. Change your snapshot type

    gp3 is cheaper than gp2 and has better performance. You can switch on a live instance — just verify your new IOPS is at least as high as your old volume.

    gp2 gp3

  2. Clean up unattached volumes

    Unattached EBS volumes can cost you serious money. If you spot them, investigate why they’re left behind (often a script or tool isn’t deleting them) before safely removing them.

  3. Archive infrequently used snapshots

    Archiving cuts storage costs by ~75% if you don’t need to restore snapshots more than once every 90 days.

    Warning: When you archive snapshots, AWS will switch off incremental billing and charge you 25% of the total size of your snapshots. In cases where you have taken more than 4 snapshots of the same instance, this can be more expensive than keeping them un-archived.