Idle & orphaned resources
Also known as: Zombie resources
Idle and orphaned resources are provisioned but unused assets — stopped instances still holding disks, unattached volumes, unused IP addresses, and old snapshots — that keep billing for no benefit.
These accumulate naturally as infrastructure churns: an instance is deleted but its volume remains, a load balancer outlives the service behind it, a reserved IP is never released. Individually small, they add up to a meaningful slice of cloud waste.
Regular automated sweeps for unattached, unused, and long-idle resources — plus lifecycle policies on snapshots and logs — keep them from piling up.
Related terms
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