SUS02-BP03 Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets - AWS Well-Architected Framework

SUS02-BP03 Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets

Decommission unused assets in your workload to reduce the number of cloud resources required to support your demand and minimize waste.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You do not analyze your application for assets that are redundant or no longer required.

  • You do not remove assets that are redundant or no longer required.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Removing unused assets frees resources and improves the overall efficiency of the workload.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low

Implementation guidance

Unused assets consume cloud resources like storage space and compute power. By identifying and eliminating these assets, you can free up these resources, resulting in a more efficient cloud architecture. Perform regular analysis on application assets such as pre-compiled reports, datasets, static images, and asset access patterns to identify redundancy, underutilization, and potential decommission targets. Remove those redundant assets to reduce the resource waste in your workload.

Implementation steps

  • Conduct an inventory: Conduct a comprehensive inventory to identify all assets within your workload.

  • Analyze usage: Use continuous monitoring to identify static assets that are no longer required.

  • Remove unused assets: Develop a plan to remove assets that are no longer required.

    • Before removing any asset, evaluate the impact of removing it on the architecture.

    • Consolidate overlapping generated assets to remove redundant processing.

    • Update your applications to no longer produce and store assets that are not required.

  • Communicate with third parties: Instruct third parties to stop producing and storing assets managed on your behalf that are no longer required. Ask to consolidate redundant assets.

  • Use lifecycle policies: Use lifecycle policies to automatically delete unused assets.

  • Review and optimize: Regularly review your workload to identify and remove any unused assets.

Resources

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