{
  "id": 2124805,
  "title": "Idle Cloud Resources: What an Unused NAT Gateway, Idle Load Balancer and Sub-5% EC2 Instance Cost You Per Month",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/20/idle-cloud-resources-what-an-unused-nat-gateway-idle-load-balancer",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-20T11:27:24.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/zop_8abedcc7e12/idle-cloud-resources-what-an-unused-nat-gateway-idle-load-balancer-and-sub-5-ec2-instance-cost-1147"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "For cloud users, an idle resource is a common complaint, though it lacks a clear definition. Three specific scenarios stand out: idle NAT gateways, idle load balancers, and idle EC2 instances with sub-5% CPU usage. Each scenario carries different implications, costs, and confidence levels regarding potential downtime.\n\nTo identify idle resources, thresholds must be set. An idle EC2 instance is considered idle when its CPU utilization is below 5% and has negligible network traffic for 14 consecutive days. This threshold ensures that the instance truly requires no processing power or network activity. Similarly, an idle NAT gateway should have no outgoing traffic for seven days, while an idle load balancer should receive zero requests or processed bytes for the same duration.\n\nIn practical terms, an idle EC2 instance can cost about $70 a month for a small instance (m5.large) to remain completely idle, while larger instances can cost upwards of $280 to $500. The idle NAT gateway typically incurs a cost of $32.85 per month, regardless of whether it processes any data. An idle load balancer, on the other hand, costs around $16.43 per month, even when it remains at rest without any requests.\n\nTo identify idle resources, AWS CloudWatch metrics can be used. For EC2 instances, check the CPUUtilization metric over a 14-day period to ensure that the instance is consistently below the 5% threshold. For NAT gateways, monitor the BytesOutToDestination metric to confirm that no data is being processed. For load balancers, check the RequestCount or NetworkBytesReceived metric over a 7-day period to determine if the load balancer is actively serving any traffic.\n\nIn a typical cloud environment, idle resources can add up quickly. For example, a mid-sized account may have six idle EC2 instances averaging around $420 a month, two forgotten NAT gateways costing $66 each, five idle load balancers totaling $82 per month, two zero-connection databases (one being Multi-AZ) amounting to $375, and one EKS control plane without nodes, costing $73 monthly. The total idle spend for these resources can reach approximately $1,016 per month, or around $12,000 annually.\n\nThis idle spend is primarily driven by always-on compute resources and databases, with network gear like NAT gateways and load balancers adding a fixed-price burden. To address this issue, organizations should establish clear thresholds for identifying idle resources and prioritize cleanup actions based on these thresholds. Additionally, regularly monitoring and analyzing cloud spend can help uncover idle resources and optimize resource allocation, leading to cost savings and improved operational efficiency.",
  "summary": "\"We're paying for things that are running and doing nothing\" is the most common cloud cost complaint, and also the least specific. Idle isn't one thing. An idle NAT gateway, an idle load balancer, and a 4%-CPU EC2 instance are three different problems with three different price tags and three different confidence levels about whether they're safe to touch. So here's the specific version: for each…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}