That 500GB EBS Volume is 90% Empty: Right-Size It and Stop Wasting Money 💾

Most EBS volumes are wildly over-provisioned. Here's how to find the bloated ones, safely shrink them, and automate right-sizing with Terraform. Here's a question nobody asks often enough: How much of your EBS storage are you actually using? In most AWS accounts, the answer is terrifyingly low. Teams provision 500GB "just in case" and use 40GB. They request io2 when gp3 would be fine. They set 10,000 IOPS when the volume barely hits 200. You're paying for every unused gigabyte, every idle IOP, every megabyte of throughput — every second of every day . Let's find the waste and kill it. 🔪 💸 Where the Money Hides EBS pricing has three dimensions, and most teams overspend on all of them: EBS Cost = Storage (GB) + IOPS + Throughput gp3 pricing: Storage: $0.08/GB/month IOPS: Free up to 3,000, then $0.005/IOPS Throughput: Free up to 125 MB/s, then $0.04/MB/s io2 pricing: Storage: $0.125/GB/month IOPS: $0.065/IOPS/month ← This gets expensive FAST A real example from a production account: Volum