I just cleaned up an environment I had set up in Amazon years ago for a client. (The client wanted to use Amazon, so we did.) In doing so, I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind which would cause me to continue getting billed even though I was no longer actively using EC2. I believe that the following checklist was useful in insuring this.

My EC2 cleanup checkist:

1. Delete my Elastic IPs
2. Terminated instances – running and non-running  (I did this before deleting volumes, since it deleted alot of them for me)
3. Delete remaining volumes
4. Delete my security groups ( 1 will be left – the default one)
5. Deregister AMIs
6. Delete snapshots (you need to deregister your AMIs before you do this)
7. Check your account balance
8. In a few days, check your account balance to see if there are any charges you haven’t accounted for

After following this checklist, my EC2 environment was cleaned up. Depending on how you are using EC2, you may have more things to delete. Checking your account balance will help there: if you left things behind, they may incur charges. An increase in your account balance will help flush them out.

One thing to consider: you may delete something, but it doesn’t show in admin console. If that is the case, logout and then in. I did that when I was having trouble deregistering my AMIs. I logged out and then in and when I checked them, they were now deregistered.