You Fixed Idle EC2. Now Which Team Is Still Running a Staging RDS Nobody Owns?

The database that outlived the feature branch

Six weeks ago your team provisioned a db.t3.medium RDS instance for a feature branch - call it feature/payments-v2. The branch shipped, got merged, went to production. The RDS instance did not follow. It sat there, a snapshot of a decision nobody reversed, accruing roughly $0.068 per hour around the clock.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the structural default of how AWS resources get created versus how they get cleaned up. Compute (EC2, ECS tasks) tends to get attention first because the cost is visible and the ownership is obvious. Databases and services that support work-in-progress are harder to kill: someone worries the data is still needed, the cleanup ticket never gets prioritized, and the resource keeps billing.

The gap between "we shipped" and "we cleaned up" is where a disproportionate share of dev and staging spend lives.

Why EC2 gets fixed first - and what gets left behind