Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets

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.

Best Practices

Conduct Regular Resource Inventory Audits

• Perform scheduled evaluations of all cloud resources to identify assets that are unused or underutilized.
• Document and track the purpose, ownership, and usage metrics of each resource, ensuring you have clear visibility into their status.
• Retire or resize resources that are no longer necessary to eliminate waste and maintain a lean inventory.

Automate Unused Resource Detection

• Leverage monitoring and governance tools to detect idle resources (such as EC2 instances with low CPU utilization).
• Automate notifications and trigger workflows that initiate the decommissioning process upon detection of unused resources.
• Ensure scheduled scripts or functions run regularly to minimize the chance of overlooked waste.

Implement Lifecycle Management Policies

• Define policies for creating, reviewing, and retiring resources in line with organizational needs.
• Use tagging standards to designate each resource’s purpose, department, and lifecycle stage to simplify tracking.
• Incorporate cost, usage, and sustainability metrics into your lifecycle policies to promote efficient resource usage.

Educate and Empower Teams on Resource Efficiency

• Train teams on best practices for cloud resource provisioning, emphasizing the importance of sustainable deployment patterns.
• Share guidelines on requesting, sizing, and decommissioning resources, ensuring all stakeholders maintain minimal waste.
• Foster a culture of ownership and accountability, rewarding initiatives that proactively reduce unused resources and drive sustainable outcomes.

Questions to ask your team

• Do you periodically review your environment for unused or idle resources and decommission them promptly?
• Have you established automated mechanisms (e.g., scripts or tools) to detect and remove underutilized cloud assets, such as stopped instances, stale backups, or unattached volumes?
• Are there policies or processes in place to ensure new resources are only provisioned when strictly needed and decommissioned as soon as they become unnecessary?
• Do you maintain an updated inventory of all cloud resources to identify and act on orphaned or obsolete assets regularly?
• Have you implemented tagging strategies to help track resource ownership and usage, enabling you to spot and eliminate unused resources more effectively?

Who should be doing this?

Governance and Compliance Lead

• Establish policies and standards to prevent unused asset creation
• Monitor compliance with resource usage guidelines
• Review and approve decommissioning plans

DevOps Engineer

• Implement automation to detect and remove unused resources
• Manage infrastructure as code for efficient provisioning and decommissioning
• Collaborate with teams to ensure new builds do not introduce unnecessary resources

Solutions Architect

• Design scalable architectures that only provision required resources
• Evaluate resource utilization to identify potential areas for optimization
• Advise on right-sizing and decommissioning strategies

IT Procurement Manager

• Oversee asset procurement requests to align with usage requirements
• Collaborate with technical teams to ensure no overprovisioning occurs
• Track lifecycle of assets to confirm timely decommissioning and cost savings

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• Unused Asset Decommissioning Checklist: A structured checklist that guides teams in identifying and retiring unused or underutilized resources to reduce waste.
• Resource Usage Policy: A policy document outlining standards and guidelines for continuous assessment of resource usage, ensuring no excess assets are created or maintained.
• Cloud Resource Utilization Dashboard: A real-time dashboard for monitoring provisioned cloud resources, highlighting idle or underutilized instances to prompt timely decommissioning.
• Asset Cleanup Runbook: An operational guide providing detailed procedures for identifying, reviewing, and removing obsolete assets within the cloud environment.

Cloud Services

AWS

• AWS Trusted Advisor: Helps identify unused or underutilized resources and provides recommendations to reduce waste.
• AWS Cost Explorer: Analyzes cost and usage to detect areas of over-provisioning and highlight idle resources.
• AWS Compute Optimizer: Provides recommendations to right-size or terminate underutilized AWS resources based on usage metrics.

Azure

• Azure Advisor: Evaluates resource configuration and usage, and suggests ways to reduce impact by removing unused resources.
• Azure Monitor: Collects and analyzes data on resource performance, helping identify and decommission idle assets.
• Azure Resource Graph: Enables exploration of resources across subscriptions to identify unused assets for decommissioning.

Google Cloud Platform

• Cloud Recommender: Offers sizing recommendations and identifies idle or underutilized resources to reduce waste.
• Cloud Monitoring: Provides metrics and alerts that help pinpoint underused resources and optimize usage.
• Cloud Logging: Logs resource usage and helps identify unused assets that can be shut down or decommissioned.