Every cloud account is haunted. Not by anything dramatic, just by resources that outlived whatever created them and now bill you every hour for nothing. I call them cloud zombies: things nobody owns, nobody uses, and nobody remembers, quietly draining the budget. They are the cheapest waste to kill because deleting them breaks nothing, and the easiest to ignore because none of them is big on its own.
Here is a field guide to the most common zombies, how to find each, and how to kill them safely.
1. Unattached EBS volumes
When you terminate an EC2 instance, its data volumes do not always go with it. Volumes with "delete on termination" off survive, detached, billing per GB forever. A 500 GB gp3 volume nobody has touched in a year is pure waste.
Find them:
