Five line items worth auditing in your cloud bill this quarter
None of these are clever. All of them keep finding money.
Most cloud cost work is not optimisation. It is finding the things nobody meant to be running. Here are the five places I keep finding them, roughly in order of how much they tend to be worth.
Idle load balancers
A load balancer with no healthy targets still bills. They accumulate behind deleted services, half-finished migrations, and environments someone tore down in a hurry. The check is trivial — list balancers, list target groups, find the ones with nothing behind them — and it is almost never zero.
Unattached storage volumes
When an instance is terminated, its volumes are not always deleted with it. The default depends on how the instance was created, which means the answer varies across a fleet built over several years. Unattached volumes are pure waste, and snapshots of them quietly become their own line item.
Snapshots without a lifecycle policy
Snapshots are cheap individually and expensive in aggregate, because nothing deletes them by default. If you have never set a retention policy, you are paying for every backup you have ever taken. Look at the oldest one before you decide how urgent this is.
Cross-AZ data transfer
This is the one that surprises people, because it does not look like a resource. Chatty services split across availability zones pay for every byte between them. It shows up as a large, undifferentiated transfer charge that nobody owns. Worth tracing to the specific service pair before making architecture changes.
Non-production running at production hours
Dev and staging environments running 24/7 for a team that works eight hours a day is a straightforward multiple. Scheduling them off outside working hours is one of the few changes with no performance tradeoff at all.
The pattern in all five: none require an architecture decision, a migration, or a negotiation. They are the result of defaults that made sense for a single service and stopped making sense at scale. Run them as a checklist quarterly rather than as a project once.