[pmoriarty]

I recently saw a talk by a couple of former Google employees who have a business helping cloud customers save money, and they were saying that they see a lot of money being wasted by companies in overprovisioning and neglecting to shut down or delete unused resources like VMs or virtual disks.

Some of their advice for saving money was to keep track of who created each resource and why, so there's less reason to doubt whether an apparently unused resource can be deleted, and to make some limits regarding how many resources can be automatically created (especially in dev environments). Some other ideas were to look for signs of inactivity like low CPU or bandwidth use, and consider deleting such little used resources.

There was much more to the talk, but those were some of the highlights that I can remember without digging out my notes. It was a good talk.

[spike021]

Makes sense. If you're not properly tagging your resources then it can be very hard to track down if/where it's been used, how often, or when it was used last. You can automate/template as much orchestration as you want with stuff like Terraform to bring up well-defined resources, but there will always be outliers without tagging.