A municipal GIS team provisioned 10 TB Amazon EBS volumes for mapping servers, but CloudWatch metrics show only about 1 TB used for months. What should the city architect do to cut storage cost without changing the application design?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Paying for empty disk is like renting a warehouse and filling one shelf. Metrics already show ~1 TB used, so shrink the EBS to what you need and keep watching growth—don't fund 10 TB of air.
Full Explanation
Cost-optimized storage designs size block volumes to actual utilization rather than worst-case guesses. CloudWatch and related capacity metrics reveal over-provisioned EBS; architects reduce volume size (or recreate with a smaller volume and migrate data) and continue monitoring. Reserved Instances address compute commitment, Glacier targets object archive access patterns, and Intelligent-Tiering applies to EFS/S3-style services—not EBS volume resizing.