Finding and Deleting Orphaned EBS Volumes is Now a Breeze 

When EC2 instances are routinely spun up and down, orphaned EBS volumes are a common oversight that commonly results in substantial cloud waste. Unless you select the “Delete on Termination” option during instance launch, terminating the EC2 instance will only detach the EBS volume, not delete it. As a result, EBS volumes that haven’t been used in weeks or months frequently accumulate, draining resources and inflating bills.

What’s New

nOps is launching a new feature that makes it easy to find and delete orphaned AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for significant cost savings.

Now with nOps Essentials, you can detect and delete EBS volumes in a single click — saving you from the tedious and time-consuming process of manually cleaning them up. 

Here’s how nOps makes the process better.

• Effortless EBS Volume Cleanup. nOps streamlines the process of identifying and deleting unused EBS volumes with just one click, eliminating the need for manual cleanup and saving valuable engineering time.
• Minimal risk. Before deleting a volume, nOps offers the option to take a cost-effective snapshot to ensure you have a backup in case rollback is needed, providing full peace of mind while optimizing costs.
• Intelligent savings. In some cases, such as Cold HDD (sc1) Volumes, you might not save by moving to a snapshot. nOps only offers recommendations that result in net savings. 

Clean up idle EBS volumes in the nOps Essentials dashboard

How it Works

Note: To access this feature, you must have purchased the nOps Essentials package.

1. If you’re onboarded to nOps, data will automatically be collected from your AWS API. 
2. If an EBS volume is not associated or attached with any EC2 instance for the last 10 days, it is considered orphaned.
   
   
3. If you will save by deleting the EBS volume, nOps will recommend that you do so and offer you the option to take a snapshot.
4. Review recommendations. When you accept recommendations, nOps will remove the orphaned EBS volumes.

How to Get Started

EBS Volume Cleanup is just the latest feature added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. Get started with three free recommendations. Upgrade for unlimited EBS recommendations, as well as: 

• Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
• Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
• One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates
• One-click stop idle EC2 instances: Halt idle instances effortlessly, for immediate savings while retaining full operational flexibility with the option to reactivate instances as needed 

We're Here to Help

Have questions? Need help getting started? Our dedicated support team is here for you. Simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager or visit our Help Center. If you’re not sure who your CSM is, send our Support Team an email

New to nOps?

You can get started with nOps by signing up for a free account or scheduling a demo with one of our AWS experts.

nOps Compute Copilot, the premier solution for optimizing AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) through smart Spot instance utilization, is pleased to announce enhanced Spot controls

By perpetually monitoring the Spot market and assessing your workload demands, nOps Compute Copilot dynamically reallocates workloads to the most stable and diverse instance types. This significantly reduces involuntary disruptions, making it orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to save with cost-effective Spot instances.

Today, we’re releasing some new features that help you fine-tune your Spot preferences. And there’s no need to dig into your ASG to perform any tedious configurations — Copilot unlocks all the options in a simple and easy UI.

Simplified Spot Controls and Preferences

Copilot looks at your dynamic usage and organization-wide existing Reserved Instances and Savings Plan commitments to put you on exactly the right amount of Spot for maximum stability and savings. 

To accommodate your workload preferences, you can specify how each ASG leverages On-Demand and Spot Instances. For example, you can specify a certain number of On-Demand instances.

• Minimum number of On-Demand Instances (NEW): The minimum amount of the Auto Scaling group's capacity that must be fulfilled by On-Demand Instances. This base portion is launched first as your group scales.
• Spot Percent (EXISTING): Controls the percentages of On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances for your additional capacity beyond Minimum number of On-Demand Instances. 
• Max Spot Instances (EXISTING): the maximum number of Spot instances that Copilot will launch as your ASG scales. 

Simply enter your requirements through text and draggable bars, and Copilot will apply your changes without any additional effort required on your part. 

Control Scale-in Protection right from the Copilot UI

Scale-in protection can be used to protect certain instances from unwanted terminations. If scale-in protection is enabled, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling (and Compute Copilot) will not terminate any instance in the group. However, scale-in protection is often unnecessarily or inadvertently enabled, preventing Copilot from performing Spot replacements.

Now, it’s easy to ignore unwanted scale-in protection in the Copilot UI. If desired, check the box and we’ll take care of the rest. 

Fine-tune your ASG configurations with new options for granular control

More about Copilot for ASG

You can read more about Compute Copilot for ASG for more details on how nOps automatically and continually moves your ASG workloads onto the most reliable and best priced Spot instances, balancing commitments and Spot for optimal price and stability. Or, find out how to onboard your ASGs at the nOps Help site.

AWS accounts often accumulate unused EC2 instances over time. These instances, often remnants of workload migrations, auto-scaling misconfigurations, developmental tests, or orphaned resources from discontinued projects, drive up unnecessary costs without delivering value. 

Stopping idle instances is one of the most effective cloud optimization strategies. For every dollar saved on an instance, two more dollars are saved on accompanying storage, network, and database charges.

nOps Essentials is thrilled to unveil a feature making it ultra easy to eliminate these wasteful hidden costs. Now, you can see all your idle EC2 instances in one place and stop them with a single click. And stopped instances (unlike terminated ones) can be easily reactivated if necessary, minimizing risk and ensuring you retain full operational flexibility to roll back if needed. 

How it works:

1. nOps automatically collects data from your CloudWatch. If your instance has less than 1% CPU utilization used continuously over 30 days, it’s considered idle. 

2. Our recommendations exclude:

   1. ASG and EKS Instances
   2. Instances that support ephemeral storage
3. Once you accept a recommendation, nOps will leverage EventBridge and Lambda functions to automatically stop your instance.

For instructions on how to get started, visit nOps help. 

• One-click apply. With nOps, saving time and money is just a click away. Review recommendations through a unified dashboard showing the historical data backing each recommendation, then approve to act on the recommendation.

Review recommendations and one-click apply in the nOps dashboard

• Intelligent Recommendations. At nOps, we prioritize your operational integrity. Algorithms are rigorously engineered to only generate suggestions with minimal risk of disruption. You can view detailed resource consumption data for each identified instance, giving engineers confidence beyond a shadow of a doubt to take action.

Recommendations are backed by viewable resource consumption data including CPU, Network, Memory and more.

• Continuous monitoring. nOps constantly scans your workloads for new savings opportunities, so you stay continuously optimized. 

One-click stop idle EC2 instances is just the latest feature to be added to nOps Essentials, your toolkit for fast and easy cloud optimization. With Essentials, you also get: 

• Resource Scheduling: Leveraging ML, nOps Essentials learns your usage patterns to recommend optimal scheduling, automatically implementing approved suggestions via certified AWS EventBridge integration
• Rightsizing: Simply plug in your CloudWatch or Datadog monitoring solution for the most accurate, reliable and data-backed rightsizing recommendations available
• One-click EBS volume migration: nOps automatically and intelligently updates EBS configurations from gp2 to gp3, offering up to 20% in cost savings and facilitating bulk storage instance updates

nOps is constantly releasing more features to automatically keep your cloud environment optimized, so you can focus on what matters most: building and innovating. 

For a hands-on demonstration or more information, contact your Customer Success Manager or reach out directly. 

EC2 instances not being correctly sized can quickly lead to unnecessary expenses. Rightsizing is critical to optimize costs and stability. 

However, rightsizing a single EC2 instance is one thing — everything gets much more complicated if you want to rightsize within Auto Scaling Groups. Most sources of rightsizing recommendations overlook this area — yet it is a huge portion of your compute cost.

Why is ASG rightsizing so hard to do right?

Rightsizing instances in an ASG is infinitely more complicated than rightsizing an EC2 instance. EC2 instances that are part of an ASG should be rightsized together — NOT individually as you would normally do when rightsizing. 

The dynamic nature of ASGs is such that instances come and go over time and may have different metrics distributions. Some terminated instances may have a higher or lower percentage utilization. These factors all add a huge amount of complexity to the calculations, particularly when it comes to Mixed-Instance ASGs.

To make reliable rightsizing recommendations, we need to account for (1) ALL of the instances that belonged to each ASG, both short-lived and long-lived, (2) track all of the instances’ metrics over time, and (3) group that data together to analyze their min and max resource consumption at an aggregate level.

Example of ASG metrics from the AWS console.

And if you make just one mistake and act on an unreliable recommendation, this may result in problems when the instances reappear — affecting the performance and stability of your workload.

nOps Makes ASG Rightsizing Simple and Seamless  

Tracking all of your instances, finding the right data, performing the right calculations, and accounting for all of the possible variables in a mixed-instance ASG is almost impossible to do manually.

That’s why nOps has integrated with the two industry-leading monitoring solutions, AWS CloudWatch and Datadog, for effortless rightsizing savings. We automatically analyze every EC2 instance in your environment (including shortlived ones) and pull their metadata to group them into their respective ASGs, analyzing min and max resource consumptions at an aggregate level to provide cost-saving recommendations.

Continuous coverage of resource-level insights such as memory, CPU, network bandwidth and storage are fed through nOps’s state-of-the-art ML engine for the best rightsizing recommendations available on the market. 

Rightsize with nOps for:

The most trustworthy rightsizing recommendations. Because nOps automatically collects and analyzes highly granular data, recommendations are 100% accurate and reliable — so engineers can act on them with the utmost confidence that workloads won’t be disturbed.

Up to 50% in immediate cost savings. When engineers don’t act on rightsizing recommendations, underutilized and idle resources continue to drive unnecessary AWS costs. nOps make it completely pain-free, safe and effortless for engineers to actually act on recommendations and start saving.

How it works

1. nOps integrates with your CloudWatch, CloudWatch Agent or Datadog to collect all of the metrics needed for ASG rightsizing recommendations, based on your last 10+ days of usage. Our API queries your data every 24 hours.
2. We quickly and efficiently process huge amounts of your CloudWatch data, crossed-referenced with AWS EC2 metadata and the latest AWS On-Demand pricing data to keep track of all of your ASGs (including terminated instances). These three sources are combined and fed through a Rightsizing Engine, allowing us to understand your dynamic ASGs holistically.

3. For each ASG, each of your instances is analyzed taking all relevant info into account, such as the metrics necessary for your particular operating system. For each instance in your environment, we make the following calculations:

   • Max Disk usage
   • Max Network usage
   • Max RAM utilization 
   • Max CPU utilization
     
     For each instance, our rightsizing algorithm compares maximum recorded usage against the capacity of a lower instance type, multiplied by a threshold value that accounts for potential future usage spikes. nOps takes into account the aggregate performance and utilization metrics of all instances within an ASG to make informed recommendations.
4. If all of the instances are rightsizable, the whole ASG is rightsizable. If you have several instance types, they can be analyzed and rightsized separately. 
5. These rightsizing recommendations are then pushed to nOps microservices, which are responsible for showing recommendations from the nOps platform on the UI.
   
   
   View your rightsizing savings in the nOps dashboard
6. Every 24 hours the process runs from top to bottom.

If you’re looking to consistently optimize your AWS costs, taking advantage of both Savings Plans and Spot is key — but balancing them can be complex. Not enough Spot means workload spikes result in expensive On-Demand coverage. And over-committing to Savings Plans can leave you paying for compute you don’t need. To make matters more complicated, some workloads are better suited for Spot and some are best for Savings Plans. 

nOps Compute Copilot offers proprietary ML-driven management and instance provisioning to put your workloads on the most reliable and stable compute at the best price in real time.

nOps intelligently balances your workloads between Savings Plans and Spot

AWS automatically applies Savings Plans to usage that has already occurred, prioritizing the highest discount rate. However, there are times in which you would actually prefer to push some of these workloads onto Spot (and out of the Savings Plan), so that the Savings Plan can be used for other resources that can’t be put onto Spot.

By proactively and strategically moving certain usage onto Spot, Copilot ensures that each workload is on the right type of discount to continually maximize your total savings. Copilot allows you to get discounts on:

• Harder-to-cover resources (for example, resources that can’t be put on Spot), so that you get discounts on ALL of your compute. 
• Resources outside of your connected clusters. Savings Plans apply across your organization. Copilot can drive certain usage to Spot, allowing resources even outside of your target workload to be covered by freed Savings Plans.

How it works:

While it’s very complicated to manually calculate how much of your Savings Plans to use to get a discount on all of your eligible compute usage, Copilot does it for you automatically. Let’s talk about how it works.

Compute Copilot ASG Lambda analyzes your AWS Savings Plans across your organization and your dynamic usage. Predictive ML is used to forecast your On-Demand usage and Savings Plans usage for the next hour to predict the amount of “Freeable” Compute Savings Plans.

If you have an unfulfilled Compute Savings Plans available and your ASG scales out with On-Demand instances, Compute Copilot Lambda will not move you onto Spot. 

If Copilot predicts there is some amount of Freeable Compute Savings for the next hour, it will automatically replace On-Demand with Spot when the On-Demand price is lower or equal to the predicted Freeable Compute Savings amount. As a result, it will free Savings Plans to cover some other previously uncovered On-Demand instance.

You can consult the documentation for more details on how nOps automatically and continually moves your workloads onto the most reliable and best priced Spot instances, balancing commitments and Spot for optimal price and stability.

Here at nOps we know the CUR like the back of our hand. We built a suite of enhanced features onto the CUR to help you transform millions of rows of contextless data into the who, what, when, and why of cloud spend. 

Enhanced Showback makes it easy to see where the money is. 

Easy-to-use and carefully curated filters help you to see clear trends and outliers in your financial reporting so you can allocate 100% of AWS cost to different workloads, environments, resource type, or other relevant categories.

Often, engineering teams trying to optimize for cost don’t have real-time visibility into hourly Savings Plan usage. It is very complicated to instantaneously calculate how much commitment is being consumed at any given time and the ideal amount of Spot to use — particularly across multiple AWS accounts.

The release includes new features enabling you to break down your costs by the most useful dimensions, such as:

• Hourly spend by purchase option for any of your environments. See at a glance how your AWS environment (or any slice of it) is balanced across pricing options (RI, SP, Spot…)

Hourly spend by Purchase Option

• The amount of your Savings Plans going underutilized during any given hour.

Amortized filters reveal the amount of Savings Plans you’re using (or not) each hour

• The tools (Databricks, Citrix…) provisioning compute in your environment. View hourly cloud spend by provisioner to pinpoint the products and activities driving your cloud spend. 

Break down cloud costs by tool or service

• The distribution of your compute spend across different AWS compute offerings.

Break down cloud costs by compute type

Check out the full blog for pro tips on how to use nOps to understand 100% of your AWS bill.

nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!

Many organizations are currently overspending on the cloud — and EC2 is typically the biggest culprit, driving 30-50+% of costs. 

To tackle this problem, Compute Copilot now integrates with ECS (Elastic Container Service), the leading native AWS EC2 management service. It automates the scheduling and scaling of your workloads to maximize stability and cost savings — all with minimal engineering intervention.

Compute Copilot makes it easy to confidently take advantage of Spot savings

Spot instances can save you 70-90% on your ECS costs, but using Spot manually with ECS alone is an extremely complex and time-consuming task. Here’s how Compute Copilot makes it easier:

Copilot navigates these challenges and more seamlessly on your behalf with automated real-time instance reconsideration. This proactive approach allows you to benefit from Spot savings effortlessly, with the highest standards of safety and reliability.

How it works:

1. Scaling Operation: AWS triggers a launch of a new instance due to the scaling operation by adjusting the DesiredCapacity of the ASG. This scaling operation could be by native AWS or from a custom controller
2. Compute Copilot Lambda Activation: Whenever the ASG (that is configured with Compute Copilot) launches a new On-Demand instance (e.g., in response to a desired capacity change), the Compute Copilot Lambda is activated.
3. Spot Instance Launch: The Compute Copilot Lambda responds by automatically launching a Spot instance with the mirror configuration of the On-Demand instance.
4. Attachment to ASG: The Spot instance is seamlessly attached to the ASG that is a capacity provider for the ECS cluster confirming its serviceability.
5. Graceful Task Draining and Instance Removal: With AWS Managed Task Draining enabled, the instance will be sent into a terminating:Wait state by AWS. This will drain all of the active tasks on the node.  

With Managed Task Draining, instances are gracefully terminated by (1) safely stopping running tasks, (2) launching replacement tasks on non-terminating instances, and (3) delaying instance termination until all tasks have stopped.

At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize costs, so they can focus on building and innovating. With our platform, there’s no longer a reason to manually manage workloads; Copilot does it for you more effectively and at a lower cost. 

And there’s no vendor lock-in — Copilot updates configurations in your AWS-native tools,  meaning no major architecture update is needed to onboard or offboard. Plug it in or walk away at any time.

Join our customers using nOps to cut cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!

Compute Copilot makes it easy to save with Spot, bringing Spot market insights and awareness of your commitments to your ASGs. 

Copilot automatically and continuously tunes your configurations to ensure you’re (1) fully utilizing your commitments, and (2) always on the most cost-effective and reliable option available.

EC2 resource requirements are now automatically derived from prior ASG Launch Template configurations

Now, as Copilot moves your instances onto cost-effective and stable Spot, it will automatically ensure replacement instances are memory- and CPU-compliant. 

Simply select instance families for Copilot to use, and it will intelligently detect and apply minimum vCPU and RAM requirements from your prior ASG Launch Template configurations. As a result, there’s no longer any need to keep track of your workload requirements — Copilot fills in the correct parameters on the fly for seamless and reliable Spot savings.

If you prefer to exert granular control, you can also exercise the option to define exact parameters.

How it works:

When AWS ASG launches an On-Demand instance (e.g. m5.4xlarge):

• Lambda intercepts the instance launch event
• Determines the instance vCPU (16) and RAM (64 Gib) options
• Finds the cheapest stable instance type based on: instance families selected, vCPU and RAM options, nOps Spot recommendations
• Replaces On-Demand instance m5.4xlarge with the same or higher size Spot instance

For additional details, please consult the documentation. 

At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize, so they can focus on building and innovation.

Copilot is built on your existing AWS-native ASGs. As a result, it’s ultra-easy to onboard and offboard. Simply plug it in to effortlessly run mission-critical workloads with peace of mind that you are scheduled on the most cost-optimized and stable option at all times. 

Join our customers using Copilot to cut cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!

As many tech organizations shift more resources to Kubernetes, cost-optimizing EKS is increasingly crucial. Yet, teams often lack the time and sophisticated tools needed to continually monitor and optimize cloud resources.

Recognizing this need, Compute Copilot now supports the two leading native AWS node management frameworks (Cluster Autoscaler and Karpenter) for a hands-off approach to workload management. 

Copilot automates the scheduling and scaling of your workloads for maximal stability, time savings, and cost savings — ensuring you are always on optimal cloud resource combinations with minimal engineering intervention.

Copilot makes it easy to save with Spot, while upholding the utmost standards of reliability.

Using Spot safely with Cluster Autoscaler can be a complex and time-consuming task, involving challenges like: 

• Spot interruptions disrupting workloads
• Continually shifting price and capacity in the Spot market
• The need to repeatedly balance Spot usage with existing Savings Plan and Reserved Instance commitments

Copilot navigates these challenges seamlessly on your behalf. Every 10 minutes, it analyzes the Spot market to predict termination 60 minutes in advance. It then automatically and continually moves your workloads onto diverse and less risky instance types, minimizing your risk of interruption. This proactive approach allows you to benefit from Spot savings, with enterprise-level SLAs for reliability. 

Copilot offers automated real-time instance reconsideration

Copilot continually monitors your dynamic usage and your existing SP and RI commitments, ensuring you are on the most cost-effective and stable blend of compute resources possible at all times.

At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to cost optimize, so they can focus on building and innovating. With the platform, there’s no longer a reason to manually manage workloads; Copilot does it for you more effectively and at a lower cost. 

And there’s no vendor lock-in — Copilot updates configurations in your AWS-native tools,  meaning no major architecture update is needed to onboard or offboard. Plug it in or walk away at any time.

1. Scaling Operation: Cluster Autoscaler triggers a scaling operation by adjusting the DesiredCapacity of the ASG.
2. Compute Copilot Lambda Activation: Whenever the ASG launches a new on-demand instance (e.g., in response to a desired capacity change), the Compute Copilot Lambda is activated.
3. Spot Instance Launch: The Compute Copilot Lambda responds by automatically launching a Spot instance configured to mirror the settings of the On-Demand instance.
4. Attachment to ASG: The Spot instance is seamlessly attached to the Cluster, confirming its serviceability.
5. Graceful Pod Removal: The Compute Copilot Lambda communicates with the Compute Copilot Agent running in the EKS Cluster to gracefully remove pods from the On-Demand instance before termination, preserving the integrity of your EKS environment.
6. On-Demand Instance Removal: The Compute Copilot Lambda terminates the corresponding On-Demand instance, completing the migration process.

For more on how to use Copilot and how it works, please consult the documentation. 

nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category.

Join our customers using nOps to cut cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!

Rightsizing your EC2 instances plays a critical role in containing costs and fully harnessing the potential of your AWS resources. However, collecting the data needed to effectively rightsize can be difficult and time-consuming. 

nOps now integrates with your AWS-native CloudWatch, for effortless rightsizing savings. We now automatically analyze every EC2 instance in your environment for CloudWatch recommendations, which you can apply with one click on the platform.

For high-resolution recommendations, we also automatically ingest enhanced CloudWatch data from every instance with  CloudWatch Agents. Real-time coverage of resource-level insights such as memory, CPU, network bandwidth, volume size, and more are fed into nOps’s state-of-the-art ML engine — for the most reliable rightsizing recommendations.

Rightsizing with nOps for:

• The best rightsizing recommendations available. nOps automatically collects and analyzes highly granular data, for 100% accurate and reliable rightsizing recommendations.
• Significant time savings. nOps integrates with the two most popular AWS monitoring solutions (CloudWatch Agent or Datadog) and EventBridge. It automates the complex and time-consuming rightsizing process into a single click — freeing up engineers to build and innovate.
• Up to 50% in immediate cost savings. When engineers don’t act on rightsizing recommendations, underutilized and idle resources continue to drive unnecessary AWS costs. nOps make it completely pain-free and effortless for engineers to actually act on recommendations and start saving.

How it works

1.nOps integrates with your CloudWatch or CloudWatch Agent to collect all of the metrics needed for rightsizing recommendations, based on your last 15 days of usage. Our API queries your data every 24 hours and saves it in S3. 

CloudWatch metrics used for rightsizing

2. We quickly and efficiently process huge amounts of data from S3, cross-referenced with AWS EC2 metadata and the latest AWS On-Demand pricing data. These three sources of data are combined and fed through a Rightsizing Engine, to accept or reject each individual EC2 instance based on its utilization (resulting in recommendations for only underutilized resources). 

Each of your instances is analyzed taking all relevant info into account, such as the metrics necessary for your particular operating system. For each instance in your environment, we make the following calculations:

• Max Disk usage
• Max Network usage
• Max RAM utilization (depending on which version you have)
• Max CPU utilization

Our rightsizing algorithm compares maximum recorded usage against the capacity of a lower instance type, multiplied by a threshold value that accounts for potential future usage spikes. AWS Recommends using 80% of the lower size’s capacity as a benchmark. 

3. These rightsizing recommendations are then pushed to nOps microservices, which are responsible for showing recommendations from the nOps platform on the UI. 

The nOps dashboard shows your rightsizing savings

4. Every 24 hours the process runs from top to bottom. 

About nOps 

nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category.

Join our customers using nOps to cut cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!