Delete old AMI images and snapshots

Many AWS customers have old AMI images or snapshots that are many years old that could potentially be deleted to save costs. It is a good cost saving to delete all unused AMIs and snapshots.

If we really want to be conservative one could save them to Glacier first before deleting AMIs/snapshots. This could be done with following pseudo code:

for s in `cat snapshots`

do

    aws ec2 create-volume --snapshot-id $s  > createvol.out

    tempvol=`grep VolumeId createvol.out`

    aws ec2 attach-volume --volume-id $tempvol --instance-id $myinstanceid --device /dev/xvdh

    dd if=/dev/xvdh  conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c > /OneTBfilesystem/backup-$s.img.gz

    aws glacier upload-archive -archive-description "backup-$s.img.gz " --body /OneTBfilesystem/backup-$s.img.gz

    rm /OneTBfilesystem/backup-$s.img.gz   

    aws ec2 detach-volume --volume-id $tempvol
    aws ec2 delete-volume --volume-id $tempvol

done

Storage pricing in N Virginia region:

• EBS snapshots: $0.05 per GB / month
• Glacier: $0.004 per GB / month

An alternative is open source snap-to-s3 tool can be used to migrate snapshots to S3, this could be used with S3 lifecycle policy to automatically moves S3 objects to Glacier after one day:

https://github.com/thenickdude/snap-to-s3