How do I terminate active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?

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I want to terminate active resources that I no longer need.

Resolution

Subscriptions

You will continue to incur charges for Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, or other Subscriptions even after you close or suspend your account.

  • If you have Reserved Instances (RIs) with a monthly charge on your account, then you're billed for these subscriptions until the plan term ends. This applies to monthly charges such as:
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) RIs
    Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) RIs
    Amazon Redshift RIs
    Amazon ElastiCache Reserved Cache Nodes
  • AWS can't cancel an RI before the subscription term ends. You can list your Amazon EC2 RIs for sale on the EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. For more information, see Sell in the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
  • If you have active AWS Marketplace subscriptions, these subscriptions aren't automatically canceled on account closure. You must first terminate all instances of your software in the subscriptions. Then, cancel subscriptions on the Manage subscriptions page of the AWS Marketplace console.
  • If you signed up for a Savings Plan, then you're charged for the compute usage covered under the Savings Plan until the plan term ends.

Resources

Note: You don't need to delete your resources before you close your account.

To find your active resources, see How do I check for active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?

To terminate active resources under different services, do the following:

  1. Open the AWS Management Console.
  2. Open the console for the service that contains the resources that you want to terminate (for example, Amazon Simple Storage Service). You can find a specific service by entering the service name in the search bar.
  3. After opening the service console, terminate all your active resources. Be sure to check each Region where you have allocated resources.
    Note: You can change the Region with the Region selector in the navigation bar.

To terminate your active resources for some commonly used AWS services, do the following:

Amazon EC2

Amazon S3

  • To delete Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects and buckets, see How do I delete Amazon S3 objects and buckets?
    Note: Be sure that the Server access logging for your Amazon S3 bucket is deactivated before deleting the objects in the bucket. Otherwise, logs might be immediately written to your bucket after you delete your bucket's objects. For more information, see Turning on Amazon S3 server access logging.
  • If you have an Amazon S3 bucket that was created by AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you must first delete the Bucket Policy. The Bucket Policy is located in the Permissions section of the bucket properties in the Amazon S3 console. For more information, see Using Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon S3.
    Note: If you delete a bucket created by Elastic Beanstalk and you have existing applications in the corresponding Region, your applications might not function accurately.

Amazon RDS

  • To delete Amazon RDS Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) resources, see Deleting a DB instance.
  • To delete Amazon RDS snapshots, see Deleting a DB snapshot.
  • To delete retained automated backups of DB instances, see Working with backups.
    Important: To delete a DB instance or DB snapshot that has deletion protection activated, you must modify the instance and deactivate deletion protection.

Amazon Lightsail

Other services

It's a best practice to delete your active AWS Directory Service directories before account closure. For more information, see How do I delete an AWS Directory Service directory?

To terminate resources for other services not listed in this article, see the AWS Documentation for that service.

Related information

Why did I receive a bill after I closed my AWS account?

How do I terminate an Amazon EMR cluster?

How do I delete or terminate an Amazon ECS service?

How do I delete or terminate a Client VPN endpoint or connection on AWS Client VPN?

How do I delete a NAT Gateway in Amazon VPC?

AWS OFFICIAL
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 3 months ago
9 Comments

How can I finish/remove/uninstall CloudWatch service?

replied a year ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied a year ago

this script deletes nearly all common used services in all regions.

https://github.com/sinanartun/aws_delete_all

thank you for support. happy coding

synan
replied 7 months ago

With all due respect, this article is not clear nor intuitive.

I've had to do my own research to solve this problem and I've summarized what you need to do.

How to terminate your resources:

1 - acess AWS Dashboard

2 - in the search bar type in "tag editor"

3 - in "Find resources to tag" > "Regions" leave **"All regions" ** selected

4 - in "Resource types" select "AWS::EC2::Instance"

5 - Click "Search resources"

6 - All your active resources will be listed. Right click the name of the resource > "open in a new tab"

6 - in the new tab you've opened, go to "Instances" > "Instances".

7 - Go to the Instance name and right-click it and then click "terminate"

Now, in order to terminate your account:

1 - on AWS Dashboard, click on your user name on the top-right corner of the screen

2 - select "Account"

3 - roll all the way down and click "Terminate your account"

See? It's not so hard :)

replied 7 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 7 months ago

How can I delete all Amazon Polly resources?

phong
replied 7 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 7 months ago

There are open-source tools to do the factory reset of the AWS account.

profile picture
replied 2 months ago

Thank you for your comment. We'll review and update the Knowledge Center article as needed.

profile pictureAWS
MODERATOR
replied 2 months ago