Idle Load Balancer

Dann Berg

Service Category

Networking

Cloud Provider

GCP

Service Name

GCP Load Balancers

Inefficiency Type

Idle Resource

Explanation

Provisioned load balancers continue to generate costs even when they are no longer serving meaningful traffic. This often occurs when applications are decommissioned, testing infrastructure is left behind, or backend services are removed without deleting the associated frontend configurations. Without ingress or egress traffic, these load balancers offer no functional value but still consume billable resources, including forwarding rules and reserved external IPs.

Relevant Billing Model

Load balancers in GCP incur ongoing costs based on provisioned forwarding rules, reserved IP addresses, and the amount of data processed—even if they are not actively routing traffic.

Detection

Identify load balancers with little to no ingress or egress traffic over a representative time period
Review whether the load balancer is associated with active backend services or instance groups
Check if associated IP addresses are actively used or referenced by DNS records
Correlate creation or last-updated dates with known application lifecycle events (e.g., shutdowns or migrations)
Confirm with application or network owners whether the load balancer still serves an active purpose

Remediation

Decommission load balancers that no longer serve traffic or lack associated backend services
Release reserved IP addresses tied to unused load balancers
Incorporate lifecycle tagging and auditing practices to flag test or temporary load balancers for removal
Review usage regularly to avoid accumulating idle network resources

Relevant Documentation

Google Cloud Load Balancing Pricing Load Balancer Monitoring in Cloud Monitoring

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