# Excessive AWS Config costs from Spot Instances Canonical: https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/excessive-aws-config-costs-from-spot-instances Spot Instances are designed to be short-lived, with frequent interruptions and replacements. By: Abdeldjallil Koutchoukali Updated: 2026-09-28 [Cloud Efficiency Hub](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) # Excessive AWS Config Costs from Spot Instances The short version Spot Instances are designed to be short-lived, with frequent interruptions and replacements. [Abdeldjallil Koutchoukali](https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdeldjalil-koutchoukali/) Lead Consultant FinOps @ Devoteam AWS service [AWS Config](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/cloud-services/aws-config) Category [Other](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/other) Reference CER-0228 Type Excessive Ingestion or Processing ## Explanation Why the waste happens and who it affects. When AWS Config continuously records every lifecycle change for these instances, it produces a large number of CIRs. This drives costs significantly higher without delivering meaningful compliance insight, since Spot Instances are typically stateless and non-critical. In environments with heavy Spot usage, Config costs can balloon and exceed the value of tracking these transient resources. ## Billing model The pricing dimensions that drive this cost. AWS Config charges per CIR. Ephemeral resources like Spot Instances can generate extremely high CIR volumes because each interruption and replacement is recorded as a new resource event. This creates cost disproportionate to governance value. ## How to detect 4 checks to find it in your estate. - Review AWS Config cost trends and correlate spikes with increased Spot Instance usage - Assess the number of configuration items recorded for EC2 instances relative to the count of long-lived resources - Identify whether Spot Instances are generating repeated records due to interruptions and replacements - Confirm whether tracking ephemeral Spot resources is required for compliance or governance purposes ## How to fix 4 ways to remove the waste. - Exclude high-churn resource types used by Spot and other ephemeral workloads (for example AWS::EC2::Instance, AWS::EC2::NetworkInterface, and AWS::EC2::Volume) from recording in accounts dominated by transient workloads, using the recording strategy that records all resource types with exclusions - Because the recorder scopes by resource type and cannot exclude individual resources by tag, consider running Spot and other ephemeral workloads in a separate account where AWS Config is turned off or has a narrower recording scope - If some visibility is required, test daily recording (billed as periodic recording) for the EC2 resource types only. Daily recording produces at most one configuration item per resource per day, but each periodic configuration item costs four times as much as a continuous one, so savings can be small or negative for short-lived Spot Instances - Maintain full Config tracking for long-lived production resources while limiting or excluding transient workloads ## Documentation Vendor references for pricing and configuration. - [AWS Config Pricing aws.amazon.com](https://aws.amazon.com/config/pricing/) - [Recording AWS Resources with AWS Config docs.aws.amazon.com](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/select-resources.html) ## Related inefficiencies [Browse the library](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) - AWS Config CER-0201 ### [Continuous AWS Config Recording in Non-Production Environments](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/continuous-aws-config-recording-in-non-production-environments) By default, AWS Config is enabled in continuous recording mode. While this may be justified for production workloads where detailed auditability is critical, it is rarely necessary in non-production environments. Frequent changes in... Other - AWS Config CER-0137 ### [Unnecessarily High Recording Granularity in AWS Config](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/unnecessarily-high-recording-granularity-in-aws-config) Organizations frequently inherit continuous recording by default (e.g., through landing zones) without validating the business need for per-change granularity across all resource types and environments. In change-heavy accounts (ephemeral... Other - AWS Config CER-0135 ### [Unfiltered Recording of High-Churn Resource Types in AWS Config](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/unfiltered-recording-of-high-churn-resource-types-in-aws-config) By default, AWS Config can be set to record changes across all supported resource types, including those that change frequently, such as security group rules, IAM role policies, route tables, or network interfaces frequent ephemeral... Other --- Source: the public page above. Product screenshots and illustrative interfaces are examples, not live customer data.