u/RougeRavageDear

Spent the last couple days going down a rabbit hole of old Reddit threads, AWS re:Post discussions, and random blog posts from 2019, all trying to figure out if reducing EBS volume sizes is actually viable.

Almost every answer eventually lands on the same thing: just leave it alone.

Which honestly surprised me more than I expected. We've gotten pretty good at right-sizing almost everything else in AWS. Reserved instances, auto-scaling, S3 lifecycle policies, there's a whole culture around not paying for idle capacity. But storage still feels weirdly exempt from that conversation. Volumes just... grow forever, and apparently that's fine.

I get why teams don't touch it. The risk/reward math is brutal. Nobody wants a 3am incident because someone tried to reclaim 200GB on a production database volume. The downside is catastrophic and the upside is a smaller AWS bill. Easy call.

But I keep wondering if the tooling and processes have quietly gotten better and I'm just not hearing about it because the people who succeeded aren't posting "I shrunk my EBS volume and nothing caught fire" to Reddit.

Has anyone actually done this cleanly on live workloads recently? Curious whether the standard approach is still snapshot then new volume then migrate, or if there's something less painful now.

Hey everyone,

We’ve been told to cut our AWS bill by around 20% this quarter, so we started looking at the usual stuff.

We set up Vantage, also looked at CloudHealth, and they’re pretty good at showing the obvious waste: idle EC2, unattached Elastic IPs, old snapshots, oversized instances, etc.

That part is fine.

The annoying part is EBS.

The tools are flagging terabytes of overprovisioned storage across live stateful workloads. They’re not wrong either. A lot of these volumes are clearly bigger than they need to be.

But once you ask engineering to actually shrink them, the whole thing gets stuck.

And I get why. The usual process is still basically:

• create a smaller volume
• format/partition it
• rsync or snapshot/migrate
• plan a maintenance window
• stop services
• swap mounts
• test everything
• hope nothing breaks

So now we have a nice dashboard telling us exactly how much money we’re wasting, but no one really wants to own the risk of fixing it manually.

Is everyone else just accepting this as part of the AWS tax, or have you found a better way to bridge the gap between FinOps visibility and actual remediation?

I’ve seen tools like Datafy trying to handle the block storage side more directly, but I’m still skeptical of anything that touches live storage automatically.

Curious what people here are using in practice.

I’ve been dealing with fibromyalgia for three years and I’m honestly exhausted from trying to navigate alternative treatments. My specialist mentioned looking into acoustic compression or shockwave as something some people try for deep trigger point-type pain in the upper back and neck.

The frustrating part is how hard it is to get basic information from integrated health clinics. A lot of places won’t clearly say the price per session, how long the appointment actually is, what device they use, or how many sessions they expect before reassessing. Some just push a big package before I even understand what I’m paying for.

It feels really uncomfortable when you’re already in constant pain and trying not to waste more money.

Has anyone found a good way to screen these providers before booking? What questions do you ask to figure out whether the clinic is actually transparent versus just selling another vague pain treatment?