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Elastic Beanstalk

CostCutter manages deletion of Elastic Beanstalk environments and applications.

Supported Resources

Resource Config Key What Gets Deleted
Environments environments All EB environments (including underlying EC2, ELB, RDS)
Applications applications All EB applications (after environments are deleted)

Risk Levels

Resource Risk Impact
Environments 🔴 High Terminates all underlying resources (EC2, load balancers, RDS if configured)
Applications 🟡 Medium Removes application metadata and configuration

Cascade Behavior

Elastic Beanstalk Cascades to EC2

When an EB environment is terminated, AWS automatically deletes the underlying infrastructure:

  • EC2 instances
  • Load balancers
  • Security groups created by EB
  • RDS instances (if provisioned with the environment)

This is why CostCutter deletes Elastic Beanstalk environments before processing EC2 resources-to avoid conflicts with AWS's automatic cleanup.

Deletion Order

flowchart TB
    ENV["1. Environments"] --> CASCADE["AWS auto-cleanup<br/>(EC2, ELB, SGs)"]
    CASCADE --> APP["2. Applications"]

What Happens

Environments

  • Action: terminate_environment
  • Behavior: Initiates environment termination
  • Underlying resources: AWS automatically terminates EC2 instances, load balancers, and security groups created by EB
  • RDS: If RDS was provisioned with the environment (not externally), it is deleted
  • Duration: Termination may take several minutes as AWS cleans up resources

Applications

  • Action: delete_application
  • Behavior: Removes the application and all stored application versions
  • Prerequisite: All environments must be terminated first
  • Application versions: Stored source bundles in S3 may remain (managed by S3 cleanup)

Dependency with EC2

CostCutter's dependency graph ensures:

  1. EB environments are terminated first
  2. EB-created security groups are removed by AWS
  3. EC2 cleanup handles any remaining instances/resources
  4. CostCutter's EC2 security group cleanup skips already-deleted groups

Limitations

CostCutter's Elastic Beanstalk handling does not:

  • Selectively preserve specific environments
  • Handle externally-linked RDS databases (use RDS service when added)
  • Manage configuration templates stored in S3

Example: Elastic Beanstalk Only

# costcutter.yaml
aws:
  services:
    - elasticbeanstalk
  region:
    - us-east-1

costcutter --dry-run --services elasticbeanstalk

When cleaning up an account with EB environments, include both EB and EC2:

aws:
  services:
    - elasticbeanstalk
    - ec2

This ensures CostCutter handles any EC2 resources that weren't created by Elastic Beanstalk.