Blow up your cloud using cloud-nuke

devhops
6 min readSep 13, 2020

The nuclear option to housekeeping

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

cloud-nuke is a tool you can use to completely obliterate resources in your AWS account. That’s right. Completely. Obliterate.

Why on earth would you want to do that, I hear you cry? We’re in the business of building clouds, not destroying them. Well, there are actually several very good reasons.

Several very good reasons

  • Training accounts

We have an AWS account we call “The Playground.” The sole purpose of the playground account is to facilitate training and skill development for our staff. It’s a great tool to have, but inevitably, someone creates resources and then forgets about them. They then sit there wasting energy and money. Nuke ‘em!

  • Decommissions

Every so often, we need to wind down an AWS account completely. I’ve often spent a day or more going through the bills, seeing what we’re still being charged for, and deleting it. Nuke ‘em!

  • Fresh starts

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devhops

DevOps rascal. AWS and Azure certified. Dog person. Drivel as a service on devhops.co.uk. Octopus Insider 🐙 She/her.