AWS Compute Optimizer Expands Idle Resource Detection to Six New Services

Identifying and eliminating idle cloud resources directly translates to reduced operational expenditure for streaming companies, which often leverage a wide array of AWS services for their complex workflows. This expansion by AWS allows for more comprehensive cost optimization across their infrastructure, improving financial efficiency. As cloud costs remain a critical concern, watch how enterprises adopt and integrate these new idle recommendations into their FinOps strategies to measure their ultimate impact on budgets.

AWS has been steadily enhancing Compute Optimizer's idle resource detection capabilities. In January 2025, AWS expanded idle and rightsizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, including those with multiple instance types and scaling policies (per AWS, January 2025). This was followed by the introduction of unused NAT Gateway recommendations in November 2025, which analyzed connection counts and route table associations over a 32-day period to protect critical backup resources (per AWS, November 2025). An earlier blog post from AWS Cloud Financial Management (undated, but prior to the above updates) detailed the initial "idle recommendations" launch for AWS Compute Optimizer, which included Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon ECS tasks on Fargate, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and Amazon RDS instances. This continuous rollout underscores a broader AWS strategy to provide more granular and service-specific tools for cloud cost management and resource optimization, moving beyond just rightsizing to active identification and recommendation for unused assets across its ecosystem.