FinOps Initiative: Mitigate Orphaned EBS Cost

[VikramBabariya]

FinOps Initiative: Mitigate Orphaned EBS Cost

Context
The EC2 instance hosting the Inventory Management Capstone project (React, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis) is currently in a stopped state to prevent compute charges. However, the attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume continues to incur a monthly storage cost of approximately $0.38.

Impact
While the cost is minimal and within the current $6.00 AWS budget, retaining idle infrastructure violates strict cloud cost-optimization principles.

Proposed Action Plan

1. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the stopped EC2 instance to back up the exact OS, container state, and database configuration to cheaper S3-backed storage.
2. Terminate the active EBS volume associated with the instance.
3. Update the project runbook with the exact CLI commands required to restore the instance from the AMI when the capstone needs to be demonstrated.