# Best Practices

```{note} **Disclaimer**
It's very difficult to specify exact best practices that cover every scenario. Ask the other people on your team, your local admin, team lead, etc.
```

## Start Small and Save Money

Everyone likes saving money!

Typically, I login, and choose a smaller, a t3a or m5 instance with 16GB or 32GB of memory. That is my workstation. It's like when I had a job and I would walk into the office and turn on my computer.

## Submit Larger jobs to the Scheduler

Any large scale jobs I will submit to the SLURM scheduler using sbatch. At an absolute minimum you need an executable shell script.

```bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash

date
sleep 10
hostname
date

echo "goodbye"
```

Save this text to `test-sbatch.sh` and run `chmod 777 test-sbatch.sh`. Then submit it with `sbatch ./test-sbatch.sh`. That's it!

## Exceptions

Of course, sometimes people need to do interactive analysis, and they need a larger instance. Just don't choose a larger instance unless you have a need for it.