Asset Cleanup Runbook Example

Decommissioning unused assets in your workload is essential to minimize resource waste, reduce operational costs, and enhance your sustainability efforts. By identifying and eliminating such assets, you ensure that only necessary resources are in use, which aligns with best practices for sustainable resource management.

Purpose

This runbook outlines the steps to identify and remove unused or underutilized resources. It helps you maintain an optimal infrastructure that meets current demand while minimizing excess capacity.

Prerequisites

• Access to relevant cloud dashboards, monitoring tools, and resource inventories.
• Knowledge of your organization’s utilization thresholds and cost optimization policies.
• Defined roles and responsibilities for resource owners and approvers.

Step-by-Step Process

1. Resource Detection: Use monitoring, tagging, and inventory tools to list all resources (e.g., compute instances, storage volumes, databases). Identify any resources that appear inactive or underutilized.
2. Validation: Confirm with resource owners or application teams that the detected resources are not needed. Check recent usage metrics, network connections, and data access to validate whether the resources are truly obsolete.
3. Notification and Approval: Notify stakeholders of the intent to decommission. Obtain necessary approvals from relevant business owners or application leads to ensure no critical operations rely on these resources.
4. Data Backup and Archival: Before decommissioning, create backups of essential data. Store these backups in a secure and cost-effective archival solution to retain important information while freeing up primary resources.
5. Decommissioning: Terminate identified resources following your organization’s decommissioning guidelines and automation scripts. Ensure that tags or metadata are updated to reflect the changed resource status.
6. Verification and Reporting: Confirm that resources have been removed and no production services are impacted. Document the cleanup and provide updates to stakeholders. Maintain a log of removed assets for future reference.

Best Practices

• Regular Reviews: Schedule periodic resource audits to detect new unused or obsolete assets.
• Automate Where Possible: Implement automated monitoring or scripts to flag resources that have been idle for a specified duration.
• Track Savings and Impact: Report on resource reductions and associated cost savings or sustainability improvements to showcase the value of these cleanup efforts.

By following this runbook, you can systematically decommission unnecessary resources, align cloud usage with business needs, and reduce both operational costs and environmental impact.