Unattached EBS Volumes Bleed Storage Costs

A $3,500 monthly wake-up call on the hidden costs of orphaned block storage.

"Storage costs are up again." It wasn't a question, it was a grim statement from our CFO during the monthly budget review. Not a huge jump, but enough to raise eyebrows. We were already doing the usual cost optimization dances—right-sizing instances, leveraging spot instances, and constantly monitoring resource utilization. So where was this extra spend coming from?

It turned out the culprit was lurking in the shadows of our infrastructure: hundreds of unattached EBS volumes, silently accruing charges like digital vampires draining our budget.

An abstract representation of orphaned EBS volumes accumulating in the cloud.

The EBS Graveyard

As we dug deeper, we uncovered a graveyard of orphaned EBS volumes. These digital tombstones were remnants of terminated EC2 instances, detached and forgotten, yet still racking up charges. Over 400 volumes, ranging from small 8GB boot disks to massive 1TB data stores, were collectively costing us $3,500 a month.

It's a classic cloud waste scenario: the infrastructure equivalent of leaving the lights on in an empty room, except this room was costing us thousands.

Manual Cleanup: A Sisyphean Task

Our initial response was, predictably, manual cleanup. We tasked a junior engineer with identifying and deleting the unattached volumes. It was tedious, error-prone, and felt like we were perpetually pushing a boulder uphill.

Not only was it time-consuming, but it was also risky. What if we accidentally deleted a volume that was actually in use, but simply detached temporarily? The potential for data loss was a chilling thought.

A conceptual visualization of the tedious and error-prone process of manual cleanup.
An abstract depiction of EazyOps automating the identification and cleanup of unattached EBS volumes.

EazyOps: Automation to the Rescue

That's when we turned to EazyOps. Its continuous scanning feature automatically detected and classified all our EBS volumes, flagging the unattached ones as potential waste. Even better, EazyOps could differentiate between truly orphaned volumes and those that were temporarily detached.

The real magic was the automated cleanup. EazyOps could take snapshots of the unattached volumes for backup, and then delete them, all without any manual intervention. We could finally reclaim our wasted storage spend, and sleep soundly knowing our data was safe.

The Results: From Waste to Savings

Within weeks, EazyOps eliminated the $3,500 monthly bleed. Those 400+ orphaned volumes were gone, replaced by a clean, optimized storage landscape. We not only reclaimed our wasted budget, but also gained peace of mind knowing that our EBS resources were under control.

More importantly, the automated cleanup freed up our engineering team to focus on more strategic initiatives, instead of playing digital janitor.

A conceptual image representing the optimized storage landscape and cost savings achieved with EazyOps.

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.