Announcing customized delete protection for Amazon EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs

Customers can now further customize Recycle Bin rules to exclude EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) based on tags. Customers use Recycle Bin to protect their resources from accidental deletion by retaining them for a time period that customers specify before being permanently deleted. The newly launched feature helps customers save cost by customizing their Recycle Bin rules for delete protection of only critical data in their resources, while excluding non-critical data that do not require delete protection.

Creating Region-level retention rules is a simple way to have peace of mind that all EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs in an AWS Region are protected from accidental deletion by Recycle Bin. However, in some cases, customers have security scanning workflows that create temporary EBS Snapshots that are not used for recovery. Customers may also have backup automation that do not require additional delete protection. The newly added feature to add resource exclusion tags in Recycle Bin can help you reduce storage costs by excluding the resources that do not require deletion protection from moving to Recycle Bin.

This feature is now available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Customers can add exclusion tags to their Recycle Bin rules via EC2 Console, API/CLI, or SDK.

To learn more about using Recycle Bin with exclusion tags, please refer to the technical documentation.