GoKawiilThe AWS cleanup checklist I wish someone had given me when I was starting out with cloud.
I talk to computer science students regularly. There’s one fear that comes up more than almost anything else: “I am worried about spinning up stuff in the cloud and charges getting out of control.”
I used to feel this. Some time ago, I set up a relational database on RDS, some virtual machines as EC2 instances, an S3 bucket to upload some data. After I was done, I deleted everything on the AWS console. Deleted my database. Terminated my instances. Then I got a bill I wasn’t expecting.
Didn’t everything get deleted? Literally AWS told me “deleting” in the console. I didn’t think anything was running. What happened?
That experience stuck with me. As I work with students building on AWS, I see the exact same thing happen to them. Last semester alone, I heard some version of this story from students.
I’m gonna walk us through what’s actually going on and give you a checklist to eliminate this fear when building out on AWS.
What’s Actually Charging You After You “Delete Everything”
Here’s an example. You delete your RDS instance at the end of a semester project. Makes sense. Project’s done. But during deletion, AWS offers to create a final snapshot of your database. It’s a checkbox. You probably don’t even register that it’s there. You click through, the database goes away, and that snapshot sits in your account quietly costing you money.
Same thing with EC2. You terminate your instances and depending on how your volumes were configured, the EBS volumes that were attached don’t always get deleted with the instance. They’re still there, billing. Invisible unless you know where to look.
And then there’s this one that gets people: Elastic IPs. When you terminate an instance, the Elastic IP doesn’t get deleted with it. It just sits there, unattached, costing you a few dollars per month. Not huge, but it adds up when you forget about it. That one catches people off guard.
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