[Someone1234]

> If you use AMIs (which you probably should) to launch EC2 instances with all your software baked in already, you will probably end up with dozens or hundreds of old, unused AMIs.

We previously had this issue. What we do now is instead of leaving old ones on S3, we download and archive them. We just tag them on the dashboard and a nightly script does the rest.

In general tagging is an extremely powerful way to organize your AMIs. This article[0] has good examples of tagging you can follow. We use something akin to the "Business Tag" strategy, with an Excel document. Definitely requires some internal organisation but the cost savings speak for themselves.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/answers/configuration-management/aws-...