The lifecycle of an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume is typically independent from the lifecycle of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance to which it is attached. Unless you select Delete on Termination option at the time of launch, terminating the EC2 instance detaches the EBS volume but doesn’t delete it. Especially in development and testing environments where it’s common to launch and terminate EC2 instances, this can result in a large number of unutilized EBS volumes. EBS volumes accrue charges in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, regardless of whether they’re being used. Deleting these volumes can help you optimize costs for your AWS accounts. In addition, deleting unused EBS volumes is a security best practice to prevent access to any unused, potentially sensitive, data in those volumes.
