This week I managed to remove all remaining resources and close my AWS account. I’ve been receiving a bill for about $3 every month for a while but have long since stopped actively using the account.
When it came to closing the account, there were three things I needed to clean up.
- DNS Entries with Route53 -> moved to Digital Ocean
- BuddyBot (Lamda, s3, DynamoDB) -> service retired
- s3 Buckets -> archived locally or self-hosted Garage
Of these, it is the retirement of BuddyBot that left me feeling most sentimental. Spun up over 10 years ago, it was a service that allowed Slack users to flag posts for admin attention without drawing public attention to the fact that they had done so. I built it as a way to learn more about building applications using AWS Lambda. It has run without maintenance for almost 10 years. It was designed to hover along within free-tier limits and other than the occasional reminder that I was always approaching those limits, or that the version of the Go runtime I’d used was no longer available on Lambda, I wouldn’t have known the service existed. It is a testament to the Lambda service that it has remind this stable for so long. That said, the application was terribly architected, built to explore patterns for orchestrating multiple Lambda services. If I were to build it today, I’d opt for a single service and eliminate the complexity of service-to-service overhead, particularly around error handling.
I’ve moved DNS entries to Digital Ocean, mainly because I still have an account there but I’m trialing Bunny DNS as an alternative with a view to retiring my Digital Ocean account at some point.
With the remaining s3 buckets archived locally, I was able to hit delete on my account. 24 hours later I was able to archive the passwords in my password manager.
Goodbye AWS.