Waste Detection
The Waste Detection engine is the core diagnostic module of AWS Doctor. It scans your account for “zombie” resources—assets that are active and billing but provide zero value to your business.
How to Run
Use the --waste flag to trigger a multi-service scan:
aws-doctor --waste --region us-east-1
Categories of Detection
We group waste into three primary infrastructure categories:
Compute & EBS
Instances stopped for >30 days, orphaned volumes, stale snapshots, and expired RIs.
Storage
Buckets without lifecycle policies and hidden incomplete multipart uploads.
Networking
Unassociated Elastic IPs and Load Balancers with no healthy targets.
Why automate this?
In large organizations, developers often create temporary resources (testing an AMI, spinning up a sandbox EIP) and forget to delete them. Over time, these small charges aggregate into thousands of dollars of “infrastructure debt.”
AWS Doctor makes it trivial to run a weekly checkup and keep your account lean.