Cutting AWS waste on a small account

A small AWS account rarely wastes attention in one dramatic place. It collects leftovers: a server nobody remembers, an address that is no longer attached, a snapshot with no owner. The bill is a list of service names. It is not a list of decisions you still stand by.

This note is a way to look. It does not predict what you will find.

What tends to sit there

• Compute that is running and doing no work. A stopped instance can still hold disks. A running one you forgot about holds both.
• An address that is allocated and not attached to anything.
• A NAT gateway in an account that barely sends traffic out of the network. It stays until someone removes it, whether or not anything uses it.
• Snapshots and old volumes kept just in case, with nobody who would ask for them back.
• A load balancer with no healthy targets.
• Log groups and buckets that never expire.
• A commitment you cannot change quickly, which does not match what is actually running. Too much and too little are different problems. Sort out the idle things first.

A calm order of work

Start with things you can turn off and recreate. Write down how you would recreate them before you turn them off. A change you cannot reverse is not a tidy-up. It is a new incident.

Only then look at commitments. A commitment on capacity you are not using locks the leftover in place. Matching a commitment to a steady load can wait until the idle things are gone.

Name an owner for anything you keep. If nobody would notice it missing, that is the signal.

Check the list without signing in

The AWS bill sanity check walks the same list. It does not ask for credentials, and it does not store an account.