Decommissioning AWS resources after recovery

After your original systems are restored and your production environment is stable, you should remove the AWS resources that were created during the disaster recovery process. Leaving these resources in place can result in unnecessary AWS charges and may cause you to reach AWS service limits.

IMPORTANT: Do not complete this cleanup until AWS failover is no longer needed. This prevents accidental removal of resources required for ongoing recovery.

Before you begin

Before you decommission AWS resources, make sure that your original environment is fully operational and that you no longer need the AWS recovery environment. Perform this cleanup only after you have confirmed that failure to AWS is no longer required.

To decommission AWS resources after recovery:

  1. Review resources created by the CloudFormation stack.

    When you recover Windows servers to the AWS cloud, the disaster recovery process creates an AWS CloudFormation stack that provisions multiple resources. To see which resources were created:

    1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console.

    2. Navigate to the CloudFormation console.

    3. Click the stack that was created for disaster recovery

    4. Click the Resources tab.

      This tab lists all resources created by the stack, including their logical and physical IDs and the AWS service they belong to

    5. Review the list of resources carefully.

      IMPORTANT: If you do not have permission to delete certain resources (for example, IAM roles, security groups, or VPC components), note them down. You will need to follow your company’s process to remove these resources later.

  2. Delete the CloudFormation stack.

    1. In the CloudFormation console, select the stack that you want to delete.

    2. Click Delete, and confirm the deletion.

      The stack will attempt to remove all resources it created.

      Note: Any resources you do not have permission to delete will remain in your account. These must be removed manually or by an administrator.

  3. Remove residual resources.

    If resources remain after the stack deletion, follow your company’s policy to remove them. This ensures that you do not incur additional charges or reach AWS resource limits.