While reviewing real-world cloud cost audits this week, the same infrastructure leak kept surfacing across multiple engineering teams: unattached EBS volumes and idle resources quietly inflating the monthly bill.

Where the Waste Hides

The Silent Accumulation: As Tim O'Brien recently highlighted, fifty abandoned 100 GB unattached EBS volumes cost roughly $500/month ($6,000/year). Clearing out forgotten storage isn't just a one-off cleanup—it requires continuous ownership tracking because unattached volumes persist indefinitely unless removed.

Orphaned Post-Termination Storage: Aman Maheshwari pointed out that in environments running hundreds of EC2 instances, attached EBS volumes often survive instance termination (if DeleteOnTermination was unset) and continue billing unnoticed.

The Extended Support Trap: Antonio Augusto Maguelniski shared a case where a client's AWS bill doubled without any new deployments—their RDS costs surged from $30 to $330/month simply because two PostgreSQL 12 instances slipped…