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  • 2024-07-30

How do you close an AWS Account?

For some reason, when I was a wee lad (cough, cough), I had trouble understanding how to fully close out an AWS account. I had a production account that was part of an organization and was running some services and would incur charges. When reading into how to close out of an AWS Account, I was confused because I first closed my root user account, but my production account was still active, so I thought, "uh oh, I still have my credit card and services running on my prod account?! How do I log back in so I can shut down these services?? It's not letting me!!" When I closed that root user account, I thought my services were still active and I would be forever in debt to the behemoth that is AWS. Well...I was wrong.

I'll tell you why....

The AWS Account and the Account Root User can be thought of as the same thing. Think about AWS accounts as containers. It is a container for identities (users) and resources (AWS Services). IAM Users, Groups and Roles are created within this container. When you make this container, you provide a name, a unique email address and a credit card. That user of the first container created is the root user. Root users cannot be restricted.  Once you delete or close the root user account. All identities and resources associated to the AWS account are deleted. Unless, if the account is part of any organization or you owe money on the account. You won't be able to close out the root account until you leave the organization or pay off your debt. In my case, I had paid off everything before closing out, but ther services were still running. Luckily, once I deleted the root user account, it closed out of all the services and shut down all my production accounts associated to the root user account. 

Crisis averted...don't freak out like I did. Read this post again...

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