Orphaned Cloud Resource Detection & Elimination Playbook

This playbook provides actionable steps to detect and eliminate dormant assets that silently accumulate monthly billing charges.

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1. Persistent Disks on Terminated / Stopped VMs

The Problem:

Stopping or terminating a Compute Engine VM (gcloud compute instances stop) only stops the hourly CPU/RAM compute charge.
Attached persistent disks continue to incur monthly $/GB storage fees!

Detection:

# List all disks and check if they are in use by active VMs
gcloud compute disks list --project=<PROJECT_ID> --format="table(name,sizeGb,zone,users)"

Elimination:

# Delete persistent disk
gcloud compute disks delete <DISK_NAME> --zone=<ZONE> --project=<PROJECT_ID> --quiet

(Note: If billing is disabled on the project, you cannot mutate disks via Compute Engine API. In that case, deleting the project via gcloud projects delete will automatically destroy all attached disks).

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2. Unassigned Static IP Addresses

The Problem:

Google Cloud charges an hourly fee for reserved static external IP addresses that are not attached to a running VM or forwarding rule.

Detection:

gcloud compute addresses list --project=<PROJECT_ID> --filter="status:RESERVED"

Elimination:

gcloud compute addresses delete <ADDRESS_NAME> --region=<REGION> --project=<PROJECT_ID> --quiet

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3. Idle Cloud SQL Instances

The Problem:

Cloud SQL instances incur continuous hourly compute and storage charges even when idle or receiving zero queries.

Detection:

gcloud sql instances list --project=<PROJECT_ID>

Action:

# Stop instance (can be restarted later)
gcloud sql instances patch <INSTANCE_NAME> --activation-policy=NEVER --project=<PROJECT_ID>

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4. Unused Cloud Storage Buckets

The Problem:

Forgotten buckets containing multi-gigabyte logs, build artifacts, or stale database backups incur monthly storage fees.

Detection:

gcloud storage buckets list --project=<PROJECT_ID>

Elimination:

# Recursively delete bucket and all objects
gcloud storage rm -r gs://<BUCKET_NAME>