Idle Cloud Memorystore Redis Instance

ChatGPT (Validated by Taylor Houck)

Service Category

Cloud Provider

GCP

Service Name

GCP Cloud Memorystore

Inefficiency Type

Inactive Resource

Explanation

Cloud Memorystore instances that remain idle—i.e., not receiving read or write requests—continue to incur full costs based on provisioned size. In test environments, migration scenarios, or deprecated application components, Redis instances are often left running unintentionally. Since Redis does not autoscale or suspend, unused capacity results in 100% waste until explicitly deleted.

Relevant Billing Model

Billed based on: * Provisioned instance size (memory capacity) Instance tier (Standard or Basic) * Uptime (per second billing). Costs accrue regardless of actual data stored or traffic served.

Detection

Review memory usage and operation count metrics over a recent period
Identify instances with zero or near-zero read/write commands
Check for stale endpoints not referenced in active application code or configuration
Validate whether the instance serves any production dependencies
Confirm environment tags (e.g., dev, staging) that may indicate non-critical usage

Remediation

Decommission idle Redis instances no longer in use
Consider scaling down instance size if usage is expected to remain minimal
Use labels to track instance ownership and business purpose for easier future audits
Establish a periodic review process to catch long-idle memory store resources

Relevant Documentation

https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/pricing https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/monitoring-metrics https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/creating-managing-instances

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