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AWS Recommendations

Recommendations help kickstart your journey with governance. Essentially, Harness run certain policies behind the scenes to generate recommendations for your governance-enabled AWS accounts. These policies not only help to cut costs but also increase the efficiency of your system. On the Governance Overview page, Harness showcases recommendations that will benefit you to save costs on associated resources. You can click on any recommendation to view its details.

Listed below are the custodian policies which are used to generate recommendations that Harness offers for AWS. Along with each policy, you can also find their respective descriptions, the logic behind savings computation and the permissions required to generate or apply these recommendations.

Recommendation: delete-unattached-ebs​

Description: Delete all ebs volumes which are unattached

Policy Used:

policies:
  - name: delete-unattached-ebs
    resource: ebs
    filters:
      - Attachments: []
      - State: available
    actions:
      - delete

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • ec2:DetachVolume
    • ec2:DescribeVolumes
  • Run Once:
    • ec2:DetachVolume
    • ec2:DeleteVolume
    • ec2:DescribeVolumes

Recommendation: elb-low-request-count-list​

Description: List ELBs with low request count

Policy Used:

policies:
  - name: elb-low-request-count-list
    resource: elb
    description: List ELBs with low request count
    filters:
      - type: metrics
        name: RequestCount
        statistics: Sum
        days: 7
        value: 7
        missing-value: 0
        op: less-than

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:

    • cloudwatch:GetMetricData
    • elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers

  • Run Once:

    • cloudwatch:GetMetricData
    • elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers

Recommendation: migrate-gp2-to-gp3-ebs-volumes​

Description: Migrate gp2 volumes to gp3

Policy Used:

policies:
 - name: migrate-gp2-to-gp3-ebs-volumes
   resource: ebs
   filters:
    - VolumeType: gp2
    - modifyable
   actions:
    - type: modify
      volume-type: gp3

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days. Then, 20% of that sum is taken as the savings.

Ref: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/migrate-your-amazon-ebs-volumes-from-gp2-to-gp3-and-save-up-to-20-on-costs/

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • ec2:DescribeVolumeAttribute
  • Run Once:
    • ec2:DescribeVolumeAttribute
    • ec2:ModifyVolumeAttribute

Recommendation: delete-snapshot-with-no-volume​

Description: Delete snapshots with no volumes

Policy Used:

policies:
  - name: delete-snapshot-with-no-volume
    description: Find any snapshots that do not have a corresponding volume.
    resource: aws.ebs-snapshot
    filters:
      - type: volume
        key: VolumeId
        value: absent
    actions:
      - delete

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • ec2:DescribeVolumes
  • Run Once:
    • ec2:DescribeVolumes
    • ec2:DeleteSnapshot

Recommendation: stop-unused-rds​

Description: Stop unused RDS database

Policy Used:

 policies:
  - name: stop-unused-rds
    resource: rds
    description: Stop unused RDS database
    filters:
      - type: value
        key: DBInstanceStatus
        value: available
      - type: metrics
        name: DatabaseConnections
        statistics: Sum
        days: 7
        value: 0
        op: equal
    actions:
      - stop

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • rds:DescribeDBInstances
  • Run Once:
    • rds:DescribeDBInstances
    • rds:StopDBInstance

Recommendation: elb-delete-unused​

Description: Delete unused ELB

Policy Used:

policies:
  - name: elb-delete-unused
    resource: elb
    filters:
      - Instances: []
    actions:
      - delete

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers
  • Run Once:
    • elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers
    • elasticloadbalancing:DeleteLoadBalancer

Recommendation: release-unattached-eips​

Description: Release unattached Elastic IPs

Policy Used:

policies:
  - name: release-unattached-eips
    resource: aws.elastic-ip
    filters:
      - AssociationId: absent
    actions:
      - release

Savings Computed: The policy identifies a list of resources on which potential savings are calculated by summing up cost of each resource for last 30 days.

Permissions Required:

  • Dry Run:
    • ec2:DescribeAddresses
  • Run Once:
    • ec2:DescribeAddresses
    • ec2:ReleaseAddress