Your Cloud Bill Has Ghosts 👻 Orphaned Disks, IPs, and NICs Are Haunting Your Azure Subscription

When you delete an Azure VM, its disks, public IPs, and NICs stick around and keep billing you. Here's how to find and exorcise these ghost resources with Terraform and Azure Resource Graph - and prevent them from spawning in the first place. A company deleted 30 dev VMs last quarter. Great housekeeping, right? Except nobody deleted the 30 OS disks, 22 data disks, 18 public IPs, and 30 NICs left behind. Monthly ghost bill: $1,200. For resources doing absolutely nothing. 👻 Here's how orphaned resources silently drain your budget: Orphaned Resource Typical Cost 30 VMs Worth ----------------------------------------------------------------- Premium SSD P30 (1 TB) $122.88/month $3,686/month Standard SSD E30 (1 TB) $76.80/month $2,304/month Premium SSD P10 (128 GB) $19.71/month $591/month Standard Public IP $3.65/month $65/month Unattached NIC $0 (but security risk) Orphaned NSG $0 (but misconfiguration risk) Disks are the biggest offender. A single orphaned P30 Premium SSD costs $122/month.