Unused PaaS Service Termination

Cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Relational Database Service (RDS) incur wasted cost when sitting idle. Automatically identify idle nodes and, if desired, terminate them to realize savings.

This section walks you through how to:

Configure the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy
Define the Scope of the Unused PaaS Services to Include
Define the Unused PaaS Service Termination Actions to Take
Configure the General Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy Options
Customize the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy
Review Actions Taken by the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy
Notify Users on How to Use the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy

Configure the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy

To configure the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy:

1. Go to the Catalog page (Automation > Catalog).
2. Select the appropriate policy and click Apply.
3. Select the options to configure the policy.

Define the Scope of the Unused PaaS Services to Include

To define the scope of the Unused PaaS Services to include:

Determine which resources to evaluate for underutilization.

To define scope using Select Accounts: Specify the list of accounts to evaluate. For example, you may wish to limit the termination to non-production accounts or to any subset of accounts.
To define scope using Tag filtering: Limit the scope within the selected accounts by specifying tags for items to exclude.

Define the Unused PaaS Service Termination Actions to Take

To define the Unused PaaS Service Termination actions to take:

Perform the following action.

Configure users to be notified: Specify the list of recipients who should receive the notifications about termination. Add as many recipients as you like to the Email addresses of the recipients you wish to notify field. They do not need to be registered as Cloud Cost Optimization users.

Configure the General Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy Options

To configure the general Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy options:

Set the following standard policy configuration options when the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy is applied.

Frequency for policy to run: Specify the frequency the policy will perform the checks, such as weekly, daily, hourly, or every 15 minutes.
Fully automated vs approval required: Specify at the time it is applied whether the policy will take action after user approval versus automatically without user intervention. For details, see the Skip Action Approvals documentation.

Customize the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy

To customize the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy:

Policy designers can customize the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy definition in several ways:

Change the observation period. By default, this policy calculates utilization over a 30-day period. To calculate over a different period of time, you can update the policy template.
Change the script to draw monitoring data for rightsizing from different monitoring tools (the default is Amazon CloudWatch). Samples are provided for tools such as Datadog in the public GitHub repository.

Review Actions Taken by the Unused PaaS Service Termination Policy

These actions may occur with approval or fully automated depending on whether the policy manager has selected the Skip Action Approvals option.

This policy gets a list of Relational Database Service (RDS) instances and uses CloudWatch DBConnection metric to check for connections over a 30-day period. If there are no DBConnections, the policy will terminate the RDS instance.