Finishing up after an assembly - Green-Biome-Institute/AWS GitHub Wiki
Finishing up after an assembly
It's important to circle back to one of the main points about cloud computing and storage - if you are using it, you are paying for it!
Some examples:
- If you have an EC2 instance running, even if it is not doing anything, it is accruing costs.
- If you have an S3 bucket with data in it, it is accruing costs.
- If you have stopped an EC2 instance, but it still has EBS volumes mounted to it, it is accruing costs.
Basically, if any resources that AWS owns are dedicated to you, even if you are not using them, you are paying for them. The cost tags associated with your user will show who is using what resources, and how much money they have cost/are projected to cost for the month.
In order to stop an EC2 instance, go your EC2 dashboard. Check the blue box on the left side of the instance that is running. At the top, click on the drop-down menu Instance state, then select Stop instance. Stopping an instance simply pauses it. The resources in the cloud allocated to the instance itself (the virtual CPUs and RAM) will halt and you will stop paying for them.
Since EBS volumes are mounted locally to these EC2 instances (they are like your hard drive), they continue to retain all the information from your instance. If you would like to pause an instance and then start it up later, everything you stored on it (the operating system, assembly software, data, results, etc.) will still be there... but of course, since it was still storing all your stuff, it was still being paid for. To unmount (and therefore to stop paying for) EBS volume storage, you must terminate the instance istelf. In the drop down menu mentioned above, instead of selecting Stop instance, select Terminate instance. This will both stop the instance and unmount the EBS volumes, however once you do this, everything on the instance is deleted. So make sure you have pulled your results off from the instance following the scp instructions here.
To check how much storage you are using on an instance, use df -H. The Size of /dev/root should be approximately the size of the EBS volumes attached, and the Avail column will show you how much of that memory is not currently being used.
Lastly to delete an S3 bucket or an object within it, check out the instructions here.