Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
When no active TCP connections or traffic flow through the NLB, it still generates hourly operational costs. Identifying and removing these idle resources helps reduce unnecessary networking expenses without affecting service availability.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Network Load Balancers are billed for each hour or partial hour of operation plus the Network Load Balancer Capacity Units (NLCU) consumed, and internet-facing NLBs also incur standard public IPv4 address charges. Inactive NLBs that remain provisioned without traffic continue to incur the hourly and IPv4 charges, even when no connections are being handled.
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- Identify Network Load Balancers with no active connections or minimal data processing over a defined monitoring window
- Confirm there are no registered targets, listener rules, or backend services depending on the NLB
- Review networking and security configurations to ensure the load balancer is not being used for future failover or redundancy scenarios
- Check tagging and documentation history to assess whether the NLB was tied to a deprecated workload or temporary environment
- Validate findings with infrastructure or application teams before initiating removal
How to fix
How to remove the waste.
If confirmed to be inactive, delete the load balancer through the AWS Console, CLI, or API to stop further billing. Where possible, document the reason for decommissioning and update tagging or inventory systems to prevent reaccumulation of unused resources.
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.