Provisioning EC2 instances in AWS account

Question

Hi AWS, we have a couple of instances in the AWS account. I need to create a report for the server names, IP address and which all applications are running on them. I need to know what should be the right format to create the list and which all important information I need to provide.

Also, I need to check if the instances are over-provisioned or under-provisioned and provide recommendations. Any idea how to do it in a better way as per organization standards. What all factors we need to keep in mind for deciding which EC2 instance is over-provisioned vs under-provisioned and how to improve in order to save some cost.

Please guide.

Answer

Hi,

re, instance inventory,  the most sustainable way to obtain it is via AWS Systems Manager Inventory: see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/systems-manager-inventory.html

It is a bit of initial setup but you'll use it on the long-term with a need to scale (more instances) and be holistic (i.e not only EC2 but all services)., it is more sustainable than a manual CLI-based solution

Re. Under- or Over-provisioning, Machine-learning based AWS Compute Optimizer for EC2 is what you need. See https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/

It will tell you when you instances get inappropriate for a given workload.

From https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/faqs/

```
AWS Compute Optimizer helps you identify the optimal AWS resource configurations, 
such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, Amazon Elastic Block Store 
(EBS) volume configurations, task sizes of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) services 
on AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda function memory sizes, using machine learning to 
analyze historical utilization metrics. AWS Compute Optimizer provides a set of APIs 
and a console experience to help you reduce costs and increase workload performance 
by recommending the optimal AWS resources for your AWS workloads.
```

Best,

Didier

Provisioning EC2 instances in AWS account

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