How To Delete AWS Accounts (at scale)
UPDATE: AWS Organizations team reached out to me after this talk and asked for feedback. I’m happy to announce that they listened and incorporated it into their service offering. Blog post here: AWS Blog
So it turns out a few folks were interested in this topic, and when I announced that I was speaking at fwd:cloudsec AWS reached out to chat with their Organizations team. It was a productive conversation. I learned a few things I missed for the presentation and was able to key them into a couple of things we learned as well.
complete list of talks: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCPCP1pNWD7Ofg8prNuVasGIwkKB3Ejhw
**Check out slides for some ‘gotchas’ you should be aware of, but don’t want to encounter unexpectedly.
Slide Deck - fwd:cloudsec - Deleting AWS Accts
Since my talk - the following blog post nails the procedure: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_accounts_close.html
Just keep in mind that if you google “How to close an AWS account” there are a few other articles that come up. Bottom line:
DO NOT remove the account from the organization if you don’t have to.
Login as root, go to billing
Scroll down and click close account
It’s that simple. Hopefully, this saved you some of the headaches I’ve experienced.