Guide on how to keep the AWS configurations and stop the services in order not to be charged

Question

We were planning to launch our application much sooner. Unfortunately, we are not ready yet. Our developers have set up AWS to launch the app. Currently, I am receiving invoices every month for just under $1000 without having the app launched. I am contacting you today to ask if it is possible to keep the configurations and stop the services in order not to be charged and once we are ready to launch the app to turn the services on again.

I have received the following response from the Sales Team:
Yes, it is possible to keep the configurations and stop the services in AWS to avoid being charged until you are ready to launch the application. First, you need to identify which AWS resources are currently running and incurring costs. These could include EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), Relational Database Service (RDS) instances, and other services.

For resources that are not needed until the application launch, you can stop or terminate them. For example, you can stop EC2 instances (which will stop the billing for the instance but retain the configuration and data) or terminate them (which will completely remove them and their associated storage). 
For services like RDS, you can scale down to a smaller instance type or pause the database instance to reduce costs. For other managed services like AWS Lambda or AWS Fargate, you can pause or scale down the resources to reduce costs.

If there are any temporary resources created during the development or testing phase, such as Elastic IPs, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, or S3 buckets, you can delete them to avoid unnecessary charges.
 If you have set up Auto Scaling groups for EC2 instances or other resources, review and adjust the configurations to ensure that resources are not unnecessarily launched or scaled up while the application is not in production.

After taking the above steps, continue to monitor your AWS billing and usage to ensure that you are not being charged for resources you are not using. You can also leverage AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to set up alerts and budgets to stay informed about your AWS costs.
By following these steps, you can effectively pause your AWS infrastructure while keeping the configurations intact and minimize the costs incurred until you are ready to launch the application.

I am looking for a guide that can help me with the above.

Thanking you in advance for all your endeavours.

Answer

Hi

**Identifying Running Services:**

* Login to the AWS Management Console -->Go to the Billing Dashboard. This will give you an overview of your current charges.
* Explore Services like EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda etc. These sections will detail specific resources running and their costs.

[EC2 Instances:](https://repost.aws/questions/QUZeUjoZFBTKWlgKclmrJzNg/how-to-stop-ec2-instance) Stop to keep the instance (and data) for later restart. Terminate to **permanently delete data**.

> To streamline infrastructure provisioning and cost management, consider leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with either Terraform or CloudFormation.

RDS Instances: Scale down or [pause](https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/rds-stop-seven-days) to reduce costs. (See RDS Management Console documentation.)

Other Managed Services: Many services like Lambda or Fargate offer options to pause execution or scale down resources to minimize costs.

Delete unneeded Elastic IPs, EBS volumes, and S3 buckets. (Use the "Actions" menu in the service's console.) Review **Auto Scaling groups** to prevent unnecessary launches. (Use the "Auto Scaling" service.)

[How do I terminate active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?](https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/terminate-resources-account-closure)

Guide on how to keep the AWS configurations and stop the services in order not to be charged

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