How To Reduce EBS Costs On AWS

You’re throwing away money on EBS

How many detached EBS volumes do you have in your AWS accounts? How many unnecessary EBS snapshots are you paying for?

You can save money by deleting any detached EBS volumes and deleting old EBS snapshots that you no longer require.

“You will be charged for the IOPS provisioned on a volume even when the volume is detached from an instance.” – AWS

Escalating EBS Volume Costs

Example yearly expenditure on single attached (or detached) volume:

• x1 20GB detached general purpose (gp2) volume for 1 year: $0.10 * 20 * 12 = 24 USD
• x1 20GB provisioned IOPS (io1) volume for 1 year: ($0.125 + $0.065) * 20 * 12 = 45.60 USD (however, this depends largely on what the provisioned IOPS are)

Example yearly expenditure on a single snapshot stored in S3:

• x1 20GB snapshot for 1 year: $0.05 * 20 * 12 = 12 USD

Calculations derived from AWS Simple Monthly Calculator and EBS Pricing.

These costs mount up when you have tens or hundreds of unused EBS volumes and EBS snapshots. Snapshots are cheaper than volumes but many teams will be automatically creating snapshots in but not cleaning them up so things can become costly.

Using Cloud Automation to Reduce EBS Costs

Although you can get rid of your detached volumes and old snapshots, how do you automate deleting AWS EBS snapshots? How do you prevent future wastage? You need to write automation scripts to achieve this. However, automated scripts will require maintaining and your time could probably be better spent working on the core parts of your business.

Take a look at our top DevOps tools for Cloud Cost Optimization

GorillaStack is an automation tool that helps you to automate EBS cleanup and reduce EBS costs. If you like a walkthrough of how you can save time and money through automation, book a demo with us today.