Deleting a stack in idealstack

Deleting a stack in idealstack is apparently simple with some caveats:

Deleting the stack does not delete the AWS resources

When you delete the stack in idealstack it will not delete the cloudformation stack in AWS that contains your data.  AWS will continue to charge you for these resources until you clean them up manually.  Details of how to do that are below.

How to delete the stack in idealstack

If you mouseover the stack in the stack lists you will see a trash can icon.  Click it and confirm

 

How to cleanup the AWS resources?

Be careful and make sure you know what you are doing!!  Deleting the stack will destroy all the data stored in it including all the files, code and databases.

The easy way to destroy the hosting stack, including all your data is to delete the stack in AWS cloudformation . 

  1. In the AWS console, go to cloudformation (make sure you are in the right region)
  2. Find the stack you created in Idealstack (it will have the name you gave it when you created it)
    1. It will also have a description "Idealstack Hosting Stack. This stack is autogenerated by the Idealstack system ( )" and some tags "is:identifier: idealstack".  Check for these to make sure you don't delete the wrong thing
    2. You may see other cloudformation stcks with a badge saying 'NESTED'.  Don't delete these stacks as deleting the parent stack will delete them for you
  3. Double, triple, quadruple-check you are deleting the right thing and that you really want all your data : files, databases, the lot, deleted
  4. Delete the stack
  5. if you delete the stack a snapshot will be taken of your databases in RDS, which you might want to delete if you are certain you don't need the data they contain

Cleaning up other things

If you are leaving idealstack, and want to get rid of all traces of it from your AWS account, there's a few other things you may want to delete

  1. The user account Idealstack uses to connect.  You can delete this by deleting the cloudformation stack in us-east-1 (North Virginia) names idealstack-user-* eg: 
  2. There's also some small s3 buckets with names like idealstack.6s9jbf1.8j5jtacwsy6
  3. An IAM user with a name like idealstack-smtp-* is created for sending mail via SES.  You can delete this.
  4. SSL certificates that you setup via idealstack are in ACM certificate manager for the region you chose.  You can delete these if you aren't planning to use them for other purposes