Reclaim Idle Hosts

Reclaim Idle Hosts

Mark low utilization virtual machine instances for inactivity, then terminate them.

Cost Savings
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The problem

The promise of the cloud is always-on, highly-available, easily provisioned, utility billed compute.  It’s trivial to spin up a new virtual machine (VM) to quickly test something or to deploy a mission critical application.  Once there, we can easily scale out with additional nodes, increasing scale for the application.

Over time, an application’s use may decrease, a seasonal need may no longer apply in the off-season, or the business need may wane.

These VMs once produced immense business value, but now are just sitting idle and unused, wasting money for the business.  This capital could be put to better use solving customer concerns or building value for users.

The solution

This Shoreline automation looks for AWS EC2 machines with low CPU and memory usage over a prolonged period of time. For each VM identified, Shoreline resolves the resource owner, and sends an email alerting them to the potential cost savings by deleting this resource. The user can reject the solution by easily clicking a button in the email which adds a label on the resource marking it as currently in use. Future runs of this automation will detect the label and ignore the VM. If the user agrees this data is no longer necessary or doesn’t reply in a configurable period of time, Shoreline automatically deletes the VM.

Highlights

Customer experience impact
Wasted capital that could solve customer concerns
HIGH
Occurrence frequency
Until the root cause is identified
HIGH
Time to repair manually
1-2 manual hours
HIGH
Shoreline time to repair
1-2 minutes
LOW
Cost impact
Use business capital to deliver customer value
HIGH