# COST04-BP03 Decommission resources
Decommission resources initiated by events such as periodic audits, or changes in usage. Decommissioning is typically performed periodically and can be manual or automated.
**Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established:** Medium
## Implementation guidance
The frequency and effort to search for unused resources should reflect the potential savings, so an account with a small cost should be analyzed less frequently than an account with larger costs. Searches and decommission events can be initiated by state changes in the workload, such as a product going end of life or being replaced. Searches and decommission events may also be initiated by external events, such as changes in market conditions or product termination.
**Implementation steps**
+ **Decommission resources: **This is the depreciation stage of AWS resources that are no longer needed or ending of a licensing agreement. Complete all final checks completed before moving to the disposal stage and decommissioning resources to prevent any unwanted disruptions like taking snapshots or backups. Using the decommissioning process, decommission each of the resources that have been identified as unused.
## Resources
**Related documents:**
+ [AWS Auto Scaling](https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/)
+ [AWS Trusted Advisor](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/)
## See also
* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for AWS Well-Architected. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query wellarchitected` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).