Idle Load Balancer

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