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

Resolution

Closing your account doesn't automatically terminate all your active resources. If you're closing your account, first confirm that all active resources are terminated to prevent unexpected charges.

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

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.
   Tip: 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

• To delete active Amazon EC2 instances, see How do I delete or terminate my Amazon EC2 resources?
• You might be charged for Elastic IP addresses even after you terminate all your EC2 instances. You can stop the charges by releasing the IP address. For more information, see Why am I being billed for Elastic IP addresses when all my Amazon EC2 instances are terminated?
• Even after terminating your EC2 instances, you will still incur charges for the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes attached to your EC2 instances. Be sure to delete the Amazon EBS volumes and Amazon EBS snapshots. For more information, see Why am I being charged for EBS when all my instances are stopped?
  Note: The Amazon EBS root device volumes are automatically deleted when you terminate your EC2 instances.

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 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

• To delete your active Lightsail resources, see How do I shut down my Amazon Lightsail resources?

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.

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