Hands-on Guide: How to Find and Remove Unattached Elastic IPs
Blog post from Stream.Security
This guide provides a comprehensive overview of how to manage Elastic IP addresses on AWS to optimize costs, focusing on identifying and releasing unattached Elastic IPs. Elastic IPs are static, public IPv4 addresses that can be allocated to an AWS account and associated with EC2 instances or Network Load Balancers for purposes such as failure masking, internet-facing load balancing, NAT gateway creation, and custom domain mapping. AWS charges for Elastic IPs based on allocation time, association status, and remapping frequency, with specific rates varying by region. The guide explains how to locate unattached Elastic IPs using the AWS Console, CLI, and Stream.Security, which offers tools for monitoring and creating custom compliance rules. It emphasizes the importance of monitoring IP usage to avoid unnecessary charges, suggests automating the release process, and introduces the BYOPIP feature as a potential cost-saving alternative. Additionally, AWS imposes a soft limit of five Elastic IP addresses per region, with the possibility of requesting more through support.