Idle Elastic IPs Inflate AWS Bills
Hundreds of unassociated Elastic IPs were silently draining our AWS budget—until we fought back.
"Why is our networking bill so high?" The question echoed in our weekly FinOps meeting. We meticulously tracked compute and storage costs, but networking expenses remained a murky swamp. We knew something was amiss, but pinpointing the culprit felt like searching for a needle in a haystack of virtual wires.
The Usual Suspects (and Dead Ends)
Our initial investigation focused on the obvious: data transfer costs, NAT Gateway usage, load balancer traffic. We optimized where we could, but the networking bill barely budged. The mystery deepened.
The Idle IP Epiphany
Then came the 'aha!' moment. During a late-night debugging session, I stumbled upon a forgotten corner of our AWS console: the Elastic IP address management page. There they were – hundreds of Elastic IPs, allocated but unassociated with any active instances. Each one silently ticking away, accruing hourly charges, like phantom servers haunting our network.
EazyOps to the Rescue
Manually releasing hundreds of IPs was out of the question. We needed an automated solution. That's where EazyOps came in. Its continuous network scanning feature identified and flagged all unattached Elastic IPs. With a few clicks, we configured EazyOps to automatically release these idle IPs, reclaiming our wasted resources. The results were immediate and dramatic.
The Aftermath: A Leaner, Meaner Network
EazyOps reduced our idle IP costs by 95%, saving us $500 per month. More importantly, it provided us with continuous visibility into our Elastic IP usage, ensuring this phantom cost never resurfaces. Our networking costs finally became predictable, and our FinOps team could sleep soundly.
About Shujat
Shujat is a Senior Backend Engineer at EazyOps, working at the intersection of performance engineering, cloud cost optimization, and AI infrastructure. He writes to share practical strategies for building efficient, intelligent systems.