Question

A company runs a fleet of EC2 instances with 500 GB gp2 EBS volumes attached to each. After analyzing CloudWatch metrics, the operations team finds that each volume only stores about 120 GB of data, uses less than 500 IOPS on average, and never exceeds 50 MB/s of throughput. The team wants to reduce EBS storage costs while maintaining current performance. What is the MOST cost-effective action?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the volumes to gp3 and provision only the capacity and performance actually needed (e.g., resize to ~150 GB with baseline gp3 IOPS/throughput)

Answer

Migrate the volumes to io2 Provisioned IOPS to guarantee performance while lowering the storage cost

Answer

Keep the gp2 volumes but purchase EBS Reserved Capacity to lower the per-GB rate

Answer

Take snapshots of the volumes and delete them, restoring on demand only when the data is needed