Amazon Web Services Inc. today rolled out a handy new feature for customers who may be concerned about overspending on its cloud infrastructure services.

The new feature is called EC2 Resource Optimization Recommendations, which, as the name suggests, helps users to optimize the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud resources they use. It may not be the most exciting update from Amazon, but if it can help customers to save a decent amount of money, it could be popular.

Amazon EC2 is a web-based service that allows businesses to run application programs in the AWS public cloud. Developers can spin up instances that provide a specified amount of compute capacity for information technology projects and cloud workloads running in the company’s cloud data centers.

The resource optimization tools works by looking at a customer’s EC2 usage history, CloudWatch metrics and existing reservations, and provides personalized recommendations based on that information. The idea is to find idle or underused instances so customers can adjust their usage patterns to save on costs.

Should the tool find an idle instance, which Amazon defines as one that has less than 1% maximum central processing unit utilization, it will recommend that users simply shut it down. And when it finds an underused instance, it will recommend different-sized instances to which customers can switch to fit their usage pattern better and get more bang for their buck.

AWS Product Marketing Manager Erin Carlso said EC2 Resource Optimization Recommendations is available now for all users. The feature can be found within the AWS Cost Management menu.

The feature is currently available for all standard EC2 instances, but not for Amazon’s graphics processing unit-based instances.

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