Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
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, primarily their hourly forwarding rule charges.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Load balancers in GCP are billed per hour for each forwarding rule and per GB of data processed. An idle load balancer still incurs the hourly forwarding rule charges, while data processing charges stop when there is no traffic. Static external IP addresses assigned to forwarding rules are not charged, but a static IP address left reserved after its forwarding rule is deleted is billed at the higher rate for unused addresses.
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- 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
How to fix
4 ways to remove the waste.
- 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
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.