How do I delete or terminate my Amazon EC2 resources?

3 minute read

I want to find all resources associated with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service and then delete them.

Resolution

To stop Amazon EC2 resources, follow these actions:

Identify your active Amazon EC2 resources in all AWS Regions.
Terminate (delete) all Amazon EC2 instances and related resources in all Regions.

Identify active resources in your AWS account

To see your active resources and the Regions where they are provisioned, check your monthly bill in the Billing and Cost Management console.

To list your active Amazon EC2 resources, use the AWSSupport-ListEC2Resources AWS Systems Manager Automation document. This automation document returns information on Amazon EC2 instances and related resources from the AWS Regions that you specify.

By default, the information is gathered from all Regions and appears in the output. For more information, see Run an automated operation powered by Systems Manager Automation.

Delete or terminate EC2 resources

To terminate or delete all your active resources, do the following in the respective Regions:

Terminate Amazon EC2 instances and Delete an Application Load Balancer.
Note: EC2 instances are visible in the console for a short time after they're terminated. You aren't billed for any instances that aren't in the running state.
Delete your Auto Scaling infrastructure.
Release an Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host.
Delete an Amazon EBS volume and Delete an Amazon EBS snapshot.
Release an Elastic IP address.
Deregister an Amazon EC2 AMI.
Terminate an Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Check the AWS Cost and Usage Report or AWS Cost Explorer to confirm that the resources are no longer generating charges.

Note: Deleted, terminated, or released resources can't be recovered.

Reserved Instances

Reserved Instances are billed as a flat fee each month. The fee is determined by the contract that you agreed to when you activated the Reserved Instance. Reserved Instances can't be canceled, but if you have a US bank account, you can list them for sale on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Resources that don't appear in the Billing and Cost Management console

The following Amazon EC2-related resources don't generate charges when used or provisioned to an account:

Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
Security groups
Key pairs
Elastic network interfaces
Auto Scaling groups

Note: Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2 are separate services and are billed separately. For more information about Lightsail, see What is Amazon Lightsail?