Clusters often accumulate unused components when applications are terminated or environments are cloned. These include PVCs backed by Managed Disks, Services that still front Azure Load Balancers, and test namespaces that are no longer maintained. Node pools are frequently overprovisioned, especially in multi-tenant or CI environments.
The cost impact of these idle resources is magnified in organizations with many environments or without standardized cleanup routines. Since billing is resource-specific, even low-cost items like Managed Disks, load balancer rules, and frontend configurations can accumulate meaningful waste over time.
While the AKS control plane is free, costs accrue from the underlying compute (VMs), storage (Managed Disks provisioned via PVCs), and networking (load balancers and public IPs from Services). Orphaned and overprovisioned resources continue to incur charges even if the corresponding workloads are no longer active.
