Idle Public IPs Inflate Azure Bills

Hundreds of unattached Public IP addresses were silently draining our Azure budget. EazyOps helped us reclaim $520/month.

"Why are we spending so much on networking?" That's the question that kicked off a week-long deep dive into our Azure costs. We knew we were running a lot of services, but our networking bill seemed disproportionately high.

Initially, we suspected it was data egress charges. Then we looked at load balancer costs. We even considered the possibility of a DDoS attack (though thankfully, that wasn't the case). Turns out, the culprit was much more insidious: idle public IP addresses.

An abstract representation of idle, unattached public IP addresses, depicted as floating, disconnected nodes in a network.

The Ghost in the Network

Public IP addresses in Azure, like any cloud resource, accrue charges even when they're not actively attached to a resource. They're like phantom limbs of the network—no longer connected, yet still costing you money. In our case, we had hundreds of these phantom IPs scattered across various subscriptions, remnants of decommissioned VMs, failed deployments, and forgotten experiments.

Each individual IP address cost a few cents per hour. Not much on its own, but multiply that by hundreds of IPs and it added up to a significant, recurring expense — roughly $520 per month.

Manual Cleanup: A Sisyphean Task

Our initial attempt at remediation involved manually identifying and deleting these idle IPs. We scoured resource groups, poring over deployment histories and network interfaces. It was a tedious, error-prone process, and it felt like we were fighting a losing battle. New idle IPs kept appearing almost as fast as we could delete them. We needed a more sustainable solution.

A visual metaphor for the tedious and repetitive process of manually cleaning up cloud resources, depicted as an endless loop or a tangled mess.
A conceptual image representing automated cloud cost optimization, depicted as a streamlined, efficient process or a well-organized system.

EazyOps: Automation to the Rescue

That's when we turned to EazyOps. Its automated resource optimization feature was exactly what we needed. EazyOps continuously monitors our Azure subscriptions for idle public IP addresses. It not only identifies these wasted resources but also notifies the responsible teams and provides an easy way to deallocate them. Most importantly, it allows us to set up automated cleanup policies, ensuring that idle IPs are deallocated after a specified period of inactivity.

The Results: Reclaiming Lost Revenue

Within days of implementing EazyOps, our networking costs started to decrease. We saw a 96% reduction in idle public IP address spending, reclaiming that $520 per month that was previously vanishing into thin air. More importantly, the automated cleanup policies gave us peace of mind, knowing that this waste wouldn't creep back in over time.

Beyond the immediate cost savings, EazyOps improved our overall cloud governance. It highlighted inefficiencies in our deployment processes and encouraged better resource management practices across our engineering teams.

An abstract visualization of cost savings achieved through cloud optimization, depicted as a rising graph or a positive trend.

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.