AWS provides RDS instances that are associated with your EBS volumes. There are two types of EBS volumes that can be associated with RDS instances namely, General Purpose SSD and Provisioned IOPS. General purpose SSD volumes are cost-effective storage volumes which are suitable for a broad range of workloads. On the other hand, Provisioned IOPS are storage volume types that are used for intensive workloads involving higher I/O query processing capabilities. Provisioned IOPS cost much greater as compared to General Purposed SSD.
Hence, it is recommended to use General Purpose SSD instead of Provisioned IOPS. This is one of the best practices for saving and optimizing your ever-increasing AWS RDS cost.
How can you optimize your AWS RDS cost?
Centilytics provides a dedicated insight into the storage volume type associated with your RDS instances. It also gives you severity warnings if you have provisioned IOPS associated with RDS instances.
Also, get an in-depth understanding of why is it important to analyze Amazon RDS cost by family.
Insight Descriptions:
There can be 2 possible scenarios:
| Severity | Description |
 Warning |
This indication will be displayed when the corresponding RDS instance has provisioned IOPS storage volume type associated with it. |
 OK |
This indication will be displayed when the corresponding RDS instance has General Purpose SSD storage volume type associated with it. |
Descriptions of further columns are as follows:
- Account Id: This column shows the respective account ID of the user’s account.
- Account Name: This column shows the corresponding account name to the user’s account.
- Region: This column shows the region in which the corresponding resource exists.
- Identifier: This column shows the name of the attached volume.
- DB Name: This column shows the database name.
- DB Instance class: This column shows the instance class of your AWS RDS instance.
Filters applicable:
| Filter Name | Description |
| Account Id | Applying the account Id filter will display all resources for the selected account Id. |
| Region | Applying the region filter will display all the resources corresponding to the selected region. |
| Severity | Applying severity filter will display resources according to the selected severity type i.e. selecting critical will display all instances with critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning as well as OK severity types. |
| Resource Tags | Applying resource tags filter will display those resources which have been assigned the selected resource tag. For e.g., A user has tagged some public snapshots by a resource tag named environment. Then selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all those resources tagged by the tag name environment. |
| Resource Tags Value | Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. – Let’s say a user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has a value say production (environment: production). Hence, the user can view data of all the resources which have “environment:production” tag assigned. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided. |
Read More:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Storage.html