# Application Load Balancer

> An Application Load Balancer bills a fixed hourly rate plus LCU-hours, where the LCU is set by whichever dimension is highest: new connections, active connections, processed bytes, or rule evaluations. ZopNight tracks 90 days of request metrics and flags load balancers still billing hourly in front of nothing.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/aws/alb
Updated: 2026-08-19

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An Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes HTTP and HTTPS traffic across targets, billed per hour plus capacity units consumed. Load balancers bill their hourly rate even with zero traffic, so ALBs in front of decommissioned services keep charging.

## Hours plus LCUs

Two meters. The fixed hourly charge runs from creation to deletion regardless of use. Usage then bills in LCU-hours, where a load balancer capacity unit is measured across four dimensions (new connections per second, active connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations), and each hour bills whichever dimension is highest. Low-traffic load balancers are dominated by the fixed fee; high-traffic ones by processed bytes.

## Idle fronts and one-service fleets

The waste patterns worth naming: load balancers left standing in front of decommissioned services, since nothing cleans up an ALB automatically and the hourly meter runs against zero requests indefinitely; and per-team dev environments where each small service got its own ALB, when host-based and path-based routing rules would let one load balancer front 5 of them for one hourly fee.

## Measurement and remediation

Load balancers are discovered every 6 hours via Resource Explorer 2, with hourly CloudWatch metrics from the ALB namespace kept over a 90-day lookback and per-resource cost from Cost Explorer or CUR 2.0. Recommendations flag idle load balancers. There is no stop state, because an ALB exists or it does not, so recovery means deleting the idle ones, after confirming that no DNS record still resolves to the load balancer's name and that its target groups are genuinely empty of live targets.

## Reading the load balancer list

EC2 console, then Load balancers. ALBs share this list with NLBs, gateway load balancers, and classic load balancers, and the Type column tells them apart. A RequestCount chart flat at zero for weeks on the Monitoring tab is the idle signature the recommendation looks for.