It Took Over Two Hours for the Middle-Aged Noob to Close Her AWS Account

Which IDE should I use?

Since I just finished Learn Enough’s Git course and am about to start the HTML course, I figured this would be a good time to switch coding environments.  I still had some time left till my one-year free account at Amazon Web Service’s Cloud9 expired, but I thought that it would be better to switch now instead of when I’d be in the middle a project.  Cloud9 worked fine and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to try it out.  As a beginner, however, I found the billing system confusing.  I may come back to it down the road, but for now I’m going to try something else.

Someday I probably will bite the bullet and learn how to install a Linux system on my Windows laptop. At this time I don’t feel confident enough in my technical skills to do this, though, and I need my laptop to function for other work.  So I did some research and discovered that GitHub actually offers its account holders an online IDE called Codespaces that’s free for 60 hours per month*!  After these 60 hours are used, you can pay $0.18 (USD) per hour, assuming you choose the simplest machine type for your Codespace, a 2-core machine.  You also get 15 GB of storage per month for free.  This sounds like a generous arrangement.  I decided to set up a Codespace, and plan to write soon about that in a later post.

As for closing my AWS account, this was a bit of a headache.  Don’t wait till the last minute to do this, if you intend to do it before the free trial period ends.  I will just pass along to you some things I found out so that maybe it won’t take you as long as it took me. Essentially, AWS prefers that you delete or terminate all resources on your account before you close it. This note from the website explains their policy:  You don't need to delete your resources before you close your account. However, if you reopen your account, then you might be charged for the cost of running AWS resources that you didn't delete. To avoid charges in case you reopen your account, it's a best practice to delete all resources before you close your account.

It's wise not to burn your bridges.

Since I may reopen an account down the road, I started the process of terminating my resources. This page tells how to do this.  First we “Check for active resources”.  When you look at your bill, if you were doing the Learn Enough courses your items should be similar to mine:  Elastic Compute Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and Data Transfer.  Make sure to check all previous billing periods (months) to ensure you catch all the resources you used.

Second, we “Terminate active resources”.  I was able to delete the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance and the Virtual Public Cloud.  Then I found the console page regarding the Simple Storage Service (S3).  Using the pull-down menu that appears on the left of the screen when you point your mouse at the three horizontal bars, choose “Buckets” to see if you have anything to delete.  For me, it turned out that I didn’t have any buckets, so I just moved on.  I have no idea why Simple Storage Service appeared in my bill.  Lastly, I didn’t find anything regarding how to delete or terminate Data Transfer – I guess these were just one-time items which we hopefully don’t have to worry about.

Seemingly endless resources to terminate ...

Looking back at this page about checking for active resources, the last thing to do is to “Confirm you have terminated all active resources”.  Here’s where the fun multiplied.  Following the given instructions yielded a list of over a hundred resources that had been used in my account that I’m quite certain I had not opened or touched at all!!  This included cloud resources from servers in regions all around the world!  What was going on?  Had my account been hacked??  I didn’t even know what many of these things were.  Immediately I tried to close these resources.  I couldn’t find any way of deleting these as a group so I doggedly closed them one by one.  Fortunately, sometimes when I terminated one, a few associated ones would close as well.  Finally I got down to two which I couldn’t close (one was some kind of security key and I can’t remember what the other was).

If you have a similar experience, don’t be alarmed as I was.  I later read on the AWS site that other users had the same thing happen to them. My guess is that you wouldn’t be charged for these services, but to be certain you may want to terminate them as I did.  In addition, I contacted AWS Support via the website to confirm that I had terminated all resources.  At first I received just an automated email with several links to more instructions.  There was another link to contact AWS Support again, and you can bet I used it.  This time I received a kind email from a member of the support staff who confirmed that I had indeed terminated all resources.  I never did find out why over a hundred resources had been opened in my records but I was just glad that I could finally close my account.

*90 hours if you're a student in a degree-granting program