Kill idle Azure waste
Unattached disks, idle public IPs, empty load balancers and stopped-but-billing VMs.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Cost AZURE
Delete empty App Service plans
An App Service plan is billed for the compute it reserves, not for the apps you run on it. A plan with no apps on a paid tier is pure waste: it bills every hour and serves nothing. This lesson finds those empty plans and removes them safely.
12 min - 2 Cost AZURE
Remove application gateways with empty backend pools
An Azure Application Gateway with no backend targets routes nothing, returns a bad gateway error to anyone who hits it, and still bills the full fixed gateway-hour cost every hour it stays provisioned. This lesson finds those idle gateways across a subscription and decides, gateway by gateway, whether to stop, delete or reconnect them.
13 min - 3 Cost AZURE
Remove load balancers with empty backend pools
A Standard Load Balancer with no backend targets routes nothing, but it still carries the rule-based hourly charge and any data processed. This lesson finds those idle balancers across a subscription and removes them safely.
12 min - 4 Cost AZURE
Delete managed disk snapshots older than 30 days
One capability across every subscription: find the managed-disk snapshots that have aged past their usefulness, confirm nothing depends on them, and delete the ones still quietly charging you for storage you no longer read.
13 min - 5 Cost AZURE
Delete snapshots whose source disk is gone
An Azure managed disk snapshot keeps billing after its source disk is deleted. Find every snapshot whose source disk no longer exists, confirm none is a deliberate archive, and remove the rest to stop paying for backups of disks that are not coming back.
13 min - 6 Cost AZURE
Delete managed disks not attached to a VM
An unattached managed disk is a deleted virtual machine's storage that nobody turned off. It bills at the full provisioned size every hour, forever, while serving no workload. This lesson finds every one in the estate, tells the genuinely orphaned from the deliberately parked, and reclaims the spend safely.
13 min - 7 Cost AZURE
Eliminate unprovisioned ExpressRoute circuits
An ExpressRoute circuit starts billing the moment its service key is issued, not when traffic flows. A circuit left in provider status 'Not provisioned' is a private connection you are paying for and not using: find every one that has sat unprovisioned for over a month and delete the ones nobody is going to light up.
12 min - 8 Cost AZURE
Remove unused restored Log Analytics tables
A restored table puts long-term log data back into the hot cache so you can query it, and it keeps billing per gigabyte per day until you delete it. Find every restored table that is no longer being queried, confirm it is genuinely idle, and dismiss it to stop the meter.
12 min - 9 Cost AZURE
Delete or reconfigure idle virtual network gateways
A virtual network gateway bills by the hour for as long as it exists, whether or not anything is connected to it. This lesson finds the VPN and ExpressRoute gateways in your estate that carry no connections, and shows how to delete or downsize them to stop paying for capacity nobody is using.
13 min - 10 Cost AZURE
Release orphaned public IP addresses
One capability across the whole estate: find every standard-SKU public IP that is attached to nothing, or to a NIC that itself does nothing, and release it, because Azure bills a static public IP whether or not anything is using it.
12 min - 11 Cost AZURE
Schedule auto-shutdown for idle dev/test VMs
One capability across every non-production virtual machine: deallocate the VMs nobody uses out of hours on a daily schedule, so you stop paying for compute the moment the working day ends instead of leaving meters running through the night and the weekend.
13 min - 12 Cost AZURE
Deallocate VMs left in the stopped (not deallocated) state
One capability hiding on every Azure bill: find the virtual machines that were switched off from inside the guest OS but never released, so they keep charging for compute they are not using, and deallocate them so the meter actually stops.
13 min - 13 Cost AZURE
Lower or delete idle Azure Cosmos DB containers
Azure Advisor flags Cosmos DB containers with no activity for 30 days. Each one keeps billing for the throughput it reserves whether or not a single request hits it, so the fix is to lower the provisioned RU/s or delete the container outright.
13 min