Spot Instances are designed to be short-lived, with frequent interruptions and replacements. 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.

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 development or testing environments — such as redeploying Lambda functions, ECS tasks, or EC2 instances — generate large volumes of CIRs. This results in disproportionately high costs with minimal benefit to governance or compliance. Switching non-production environments to daily recording reduces CIR volume significantly while maintaining sufficient visibility for tracking changes.

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 resources, CI/CD churn, autoscaling), continuous mode drives very high CIR volumes with limited additional operational value. Selecting periodic recording for lower-risk resource types and/or non-production environments can maintain necessary visibility while reducing CIR volume and cost. Recorder settings are account/region scoped, so you can apply continuous in production where required and periodic elsewhere.