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AWS Final Cleanup

Congratulations on finishing all the hands-on modules for the DVA-C02 course 🎉. You have built, deployed, traced, and secured across practically the entire core AWS suite.

Before taking your victory lap, executing a meticulous account cleanup is your final operational play. Leaving paid resources running in secondary regions is the #1 reason engineers get surprise bills on active cloud accounts!

Here is your Final AWS Teardown Checklist, ordered by dependency sequence so you don't run into annoying DependencyViolation or deletion block errors.

🧹 The Tactical Multi-Region Teardown Sequence​

Execute these steps in every region you touched during your labs (e.g., us-east-1 N. Virginia, ap-southeast-2 Sydney):

       ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
       │                     TEARDOWN DEPENDENCY PIPELINE                       │
       └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                   │
  1. 💣 Infrastructure Stacks     ▼  (CloudFormation Stack Deletion)
  2. 🌐 Edge & Load Balancers     ▼  (ALBs, NLBs, CloudFront, Route 53 CNAMEs)
  3. 📦 Containers & Compute      ▼  (ECS, EKS, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2 Instances)
  4. 💾 Stateful Databases        ▼  (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB Tables, ElastiCache)
  5. 🌊 Streaming & Queuing       ▼  (Kinesis Data Streams, SQS, SNS Topics)
  6. 🗄️ Storage Buckets           ▼  (Empty S3 Buckets, Delete ECR Repositories)
  7. ⚙️ App Dev & Security        ▼  (CodePipeline, Secrets Manager, AppConfig, Lambda)
  8. 🔑 IAM & Global Policies     ▼  (Delete Roles/Users LAST!)

📋 The High-Yield Billing Hazard Checklist​

🔴 1. Critical Paid Resources (Delete Immediately!)​

  • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: High-Cost Hazard! Streams charge per shard hour regardless of whether data is flowing. Terminate all streams.
  • Elastic Load Balancers (ALBs / NLBs): Charge per hour + LCU (Load Balancer Capacity Units) usage. If left unmanaged outside CloudFormation, delete them via the EC2 Console.
  • NAT Gateways: Charge $0.045+ per hour plus data processing fees. Make sure to release associated Elastic IPs (EIPs) as well, as unattached EIPs incur an hourly charge!
  • Amazon RDS / Aurora Databases: Delete DB instances and clusters (disable Deletion Protection if enabled, and skip snapshot creation if you don't need the final backup).
  • AWS Secrets Manager: Charges $0.40 per secret/month. Force-delete test secrets via CLI if you want to bypass the 7-to-30-day recovery window:
aws secretsmanager delete-secret --secret-id prod/myapp/my-secret-api --force-delete-without-recovery

🟡 2. Free-Tier / Storage Cleanup​

  • Amazon S3: S3 storage is cheap, but left-over versioned objects or failed multipart uploads can add up over time. Empty the bucket contents first, then delete the bucket.
  • Amazon DynamoDB: Free tier includes 25 WCU / 25 RCU total across your account. Delete any demo tables so they don't consume your free-tier capacity ceiling!
  • AWS Lambda & API Gateway: These cost nothing at rest (pay per invocation/request), but deleting unused functions and REST/HTTP APIs keeps your environment squeaky clean.
  • AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: Standard parameters are free, but delete test parameters so your application namespace stays organized.

🟢 3. The CloudFormation Power Shortcut​

If you deployed your labs using AWS CloudFormation, you get the ultimate fast-forward button!

  1. Navigate to the CloudFormation Console in your active region.
  2. Select your stack and click Delete.
  3. CloudFormation automatically tears down the EC2 instances, Target Groups, Security Groups, IAM Roles, and subnets in exact reverse-dependency order!

🛠️ Advanced Tooling Note: Automated Account Reset​

If you used a standalone sandbox or dedicated lab account and want to perform a complete "factory reset" across all regions without clicking through hundreds of console UI pages, open-source engineers use aws-nuke.

It scans all regions, respects resource exclusion filters (so you don't delete your root IAM admin identity), and wipes out all provisioned resources automatically.

🏆 Final Victory Checklist​

Here is a list of services we touched on this course, make sure you don't forget anything in your cleanup.

It's also a good time to review all your learning :)

  • EC2 instances
  • Elastic Load Balancer
  • Launch Configurations
  • Auto Scaling Groups
  • Elastic IPs
  • Security Groups
  • EBS Volumes
  • Key Pairs
  • ECS environments (cluster, service, task def, ECR)
  • Elastic Beanstalk applications & environments
  • AWS Lambda functions
  • S3 files & buckets
  • RDS database
  • DynamoDB tables & indexes
  • ElastiCache cluster
  • Route53
  • API Gateway
  • Kinesis Streams
  • SNS Topics
  • SQS Queues
  • CodeCommit
  • CodeBuild
  • CodePipeline
  • CloudWatch Logs
  • CloudWatch Metrics
  • CloudWatch Dashboards
  • CloudWatch Alerts
  • CloudWatch Rules
  • CloudFormation Stacks
  • SSM Parameter Store
  • IAM User / Groups / Roles / Policies

That was a lot of services, but you did it!