CodeBuild projects with no builds, and why they carry no saving
What does ZopNight detect here?
AWS CodeBuild bills on-demand builds per minute of build time, rounded up, with no minimum fee, so a project that never runs a build costs nothing. ZopNight therefore raises no saving for idle CodeBuild projects; the cost to watch is a reserved capacity fleet, which bills per instance-minute while it exists.
Signal and threshold
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Rule IDs | RC-184 |
| Category | idle |
| Severity | low |
| Metric | Builds |
| Threshold | no finding raised |
| Evaluation window | 30d |
| Source | ZopNight |
| Permissions used | codebuild:ListProjects · codebuild:ListBuildsForProject · codebuild:BatchGetBuilds · codebuild:ListFleets |
Where it applies
On-demand CodeBuild has no standing charge
CodeBuild pricing is pay as you go, with no upfront
costs or minimum fees. On-demand builds are charged for the compute type you choose for the time
from submitting the build until it terminates, rounded up to the nearest minute. The free tier
includes 100 build minutes a month on general1.small or arm1.small.
The consequence is simple: a project that has not run a build in months has cost nothing in months. Deleting it tidies the account, but it does not change the bill.
Seeing when each project last built
aws codebuild list-projects
aws codebuild list-builds-for-project --project-name my-project \ --sort-order DESCENDING --max-items 1
aws codebuild batch-get-builds --ids my-project:0a1b2c3d-example \ --query 'builds[].[id,startTime,buildStatus]'A project whose latest build is months old, or which returns no build IDs at all, is idle.
What ZopNight does with idle projects
ZopNight tracks the CloudWatch Builds count for CodeBuild projects, but it does not turn a
zero-build project into a recommendation. Its idle findings must carry a real, recoverable dollar
amount, and an on-demand project with no builds has none: there is no rate to cut, nothing
provisioned to shut down and no schedule to apply. You will not see a finding for this rule.
Where CodeBuild money actually sits
Reserved capacity fleets are the part of CodeBuild that bills without builds. Per the pricing page,
fleet instances are charged per minute from the request for an instance until it terminates, with
a 60-minute minimum per instance. AWS’s example, one reserved.x86-64.g1.small instance for a
30-day month, comes to 43,200 instance-minutes, or $129.60. The
fleet guide also allows one
fleet to serve several projects, so a fleet can stay busy-looking in the bill while every project
using it has gone quiet. ZopNight does not evaluate fleets under this rule.
aws codebuild list-fleetsWhere the saving would come from
idle on-demand project: saving = 0 (no build minutes, no charge)unused reserved fleet: cost = instance-minutes x fleet rate, until the fleet is deletedCleaning up idle projects anyway
- Confirm no pipeline, webhook or scheduled rule triggers the project.
- Export the buildspec and project settings if you may need them again.
- Delete the project:
aws codebuild delete-project --name my-project - Review
list-fleetsand delete any fleet whose projects are all gone.