Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
This is common in non-production environments where virtual machines are shut down outside business hours, but the associated load balancers are left in place. Even when no meaningful traffic is flowing, a load balancer that still has rules configured continues to incur hourly rule charges, resulting in ongoing cost without delivering value.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Azure Standard Load Balancer is billed per hour based on the number of configured load-balancing and outbound rules (the first 5 rules at one rate, plus a per-rule charge for each additional rule), and per GB of data processed. There is no hourly charge when no rules are configured, so an idle load balancer that still has rules keeps accruing the rule-based hourly charge even when its backends are stopped and little traffic flows.
How to detect
How to find it in your estate.
- Identify load balancers associated with non-production or intermittent environments
- Review whether backend pools are empty or reference stopped resources
- Check how many load-balancing and outbound rules each idle load balancer still has configured, since configured rules drive the hourly charge
- Assess whether load balancers continue to exist despite applications being inactive or retired
How to fix
How to remove the waste.
- Remove load balancers that are no longer required after backend workloads are stopped or decommissioned
- Recreate load balancers on demand for temporary or non-production use cases
- Incorporate load balancer cleanup into environment shutdown and decommissioning processes
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.