Empty S3 Buckets

Why This Matters

Empty S3 buckets consume management overhead, monitoring resources, and may incur costs from any requests made against them. While storage costs are zero, they represent administrative clutter that can accumulate significantly in development environments with poor cleanup practices.

Common causes:

• Development and testing buckets that were emptied but not deleted
• Temporary buckets created for data migrations
• Buckets created during application development that are no longer needed
• Legacy buckets from decommissioned projects

How to Identify Empty S3 Buckets

AWS Saver flags S3 buckets as empty when they contain:

1. Zero objects (no files stored)
2. Active bucket status (existing and potentially billing)
3. Management overhead costs (~$1/month per bucket)
4. No legitimate use case for retaining empty bucket

How to Fix Empty S3 Buckets

Step 1: List all buckets in your account

aws s3api list-buckets --query 'Buckets[].Name'

Step 2: Check if bucket is empty

aws s3api list-objects-v2 --bucket your-bucket-name --max-keys 1

Step 3: Get bucket region (required for deletion)

aws s3api get-bucket-location --bucket your-bucket-name

Step 4: Check for object versions (if versioning enabled)

aws s3api list-object-versions --bucket your-bucket-name --max-keys 1

Step 5: Delete empty bucket

aws s3api delete-bucket --bucket your-bucket-name --region bucket-region

Prevention Tips

Use infrastructure as code: Deploy buckets through CloudFormation or Terraform to track lifecycle and prevent orphaned resources.

Implement naming conventions: Use consistent bucket naming that includes project and environment to track ownership.

Regular cleanup scripts: Create automated scripts that identify and flag empty buckets aged over 30 days for review.

Tag all buckets: Use tags for project, environment, and owner to facilitate cleanup and cost tracking.

Automation Available

Skip the manual work. AWS Saver automatically identifies empty buckets across all regions using object counting.

✅ Comprehensive bucket scanning - Checks all buckets for zero objects across regions

✅ Object version detection - Identifies buckets with versioning but no current objects

✅ Cost impact tracking - Shows ~$1/month waste per empty bucket

✅ Dependency checking - Helps identify potentially safe-to-delete empty buckets