Disks attached to VMs that have been stopped for an extended period, particularly when showing no read or write activity, may indicate abandoned infrastructure or obsolete resources. Retaining these disks without validation leads to unnecessary monthly storage costs. Reviewing and cleaning up inactive disks helps optimize spend and maintain storage hygiene.
Tables with no read or write activity often represent deprecated applications, obsolete telemetry, or abandoned development artifacts. Retaining inactive tables increases storage costs and operational complexity. Regularly auditing and cleaning up unused tables helps maintain a streamlined, cost-effective storage environment.
Files that show no read or write activity over an extended period often indicate redundant or abandoned data. Keeping inactive files in higher-cost storage classes unnecessarily increases monthly spend. Implementing proactive archiving, deletion workflows, and safety features like Blob Soft Delete or Versioning improves cost efficiency while protecting against accidental data loss.
Non-production environments such as development, testing, or staging often do not require the high availability, failover capabilities, and premium storage performance offered by the Business Critical tier. Running these workloads on Business Critical unnecessarily inflates costs. Choosing a lower-cost tier like General Purpose typically provides sufficient performance and availability for non-production use cases, significantly reducing ongoing database expenses.
Workloads with consistently low CPU and memory usage may no longer serve active traffic or scheduled tasks, but continue reserving resources within the cluster. These idle deployments often remain after project migrations, feature deprecations, or experimentation. Removing inactive workloads allows node groups to scale down, reducing infrastructure costs without impacting active services.
Buckets without Autoclass enabled can accumulate infrequently accessed data in more expensive storage classes, inflating monthly costs. Enabling Autoclass allows GCS to automatically move objects to lower-cost tiers based on observed access behavior, optimizing storage costs without manual lifecycle policy management. Activating Autoclass reduces operational overhead while maintaining seamless access to objects across storage classes.
Clusters that no longer run active workloads but remain provisioned continue incurring hourly control plane costs and may also maintain associated infrastructure like node groups or VPC components. Inactive clusters often persist after environment decommissioning, project shutdowns, or migrations. Decommissioning unused clusters eliminates unnecessary operational costs and simplifies infrastructure management.
When an EC2 instance is dedicated primarily to internet-facing traffic, regional differences in data transfer pricing can drive a substantial portion of total costs. Hosting such workloads in a region with higher egress rates leads to elevated expenses without improving performance. Migrating the workload to a lower-cost region can yield significant savings while maintaining equivalent service quality, especially when no strict latency or compliance requirements dictate the original location.
Running non-production clusters solely on On-Demand Instances results in unnecessarily high compute costs. Development, testing, and QA environments typically tolerate interruptions and do not require the continuous availability guaranteed by On-Demand capacity. Introducing Spot-backed node groups in non-production environments can significantly reduce infrastructure expenses without compromising business requirements.
Classic Load Balancers that no longer serve active workloads will persist if they are not properly decommissioned. This often happens after application migrations, architecture changes, or testing activities. Even if no connections or traffic are passing through the CLB, it continues to incur baseline charges until manually deleted. Identifying and removing unused load balancers helps eliminate waste without impacting operations.
