How to Clean Up a Messy AWS Account: A Step-by-Step Cloud Hygiene Guide

“A clean cloud is a secure cloud and a cheaper one.” - Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Why AWS Accounts Become Messy
   • Step-by-Step AWS Cleanup Checklist
   • Step 1: Identify Unowned or Orphaned Resources
   • Step 2: Audit IAM Users, Roles & Access Keys
   • Step 3: Clean Up Old Security Groups
   • Step 4: Delete Unused Load Balancers & Target Groups
   • Step 5: Review S3 Buckets for Risks & Waste
   • Step 6: Remove Unused EBS Volumes, Snapshots & AMIs
   • Step 7: Evaluate Old Lambda Versions & Layers
   • Step 8: Fix CloudWatch Logs & Retention Policies
   • Step 9: Audit Certificates & Domain Configurations
   • Step 10: Review Billing, Cost Anomalies & Hidden Charges
3. Automation: How to Avoid Mess in the Future
4. Tools That Strengthen AWS Hygiene
5. Key Stats & Industry Insights
6. FAQs
7. Key Takeaways
8. Conclusion

1. Introduction

AWS enables teams to build fast but this speed often comes at the cost of long-term hygiene.

Temporary environments never get deleted, IAM users linger for years, S3 buckets pile up without owners, and CloudWatch logs grow silently until you’re shocked by the bill.

Every DevOps engineer eventually inherits a messy AWS account.

This guide walks you through a safe, systematic, and practical cleanup process used by senior engineers and cloud consultants.

2. Why AWS Accounts Become Messy

No team intends to create chaos, it happens naturally due to:

• Multiple teams deploying resources without ownership
• Lack of mandatory tagging
• Abandoned POCs and test environments
• Engineers leaving the company without cleanup
• Auto-scaling groups leaving behind volumes and ENIs
• Manual provisioning outside of IaC
• Poor CloudWatch retention defaults
• Forgotten load balancers, certs, and snapshots
• Continuous deployments increasing artifacts and versions

A messy AWS account affects security, cost, reliability, and compliance but it can be cleaned up.

3. Step-by-Step AWS Cleanup Checklist

Below is a deep, practical breakdown of every major cleanup area.
(This is the core value of the article.)

Step 1: Identify Unowned or Orphaned Resources
These are the most common AWS “ghost” resources:

• EBS volumes detached from EC2
• Elastic IPs not associated with anything
• Old ENIs
• Route 53 records pointing to nothing
• S3 buckets without owners
• Abandoned CloudWatch log groups
• Old AMIs and snapshots
• Lambda layers and versions not tied to active services

Tip:
Start with a tagging audit highlight every resource missing:

• Name
• Owner
• Environment
• Project
• CostCenter

This creates ownership transparency and accelerates cleanup decisions.

Step 2: Audit IAM Users, Roles & Access Keys

“Identity hygiene is the foundation of any secure cloud.” - CyberArk Identity Security Report
IAM chaos is one of the most dangerous issues in AWS.

Checklist:

• Delete inactive IAM users
• Remove console passwords without MFA
• Rotate access keys > 90 days old
• Delete unused IAM roles
• Remove inline policies
• Revoke trust relationships with old apps/partners
• Delete long-forgotten service accounts
• Enforce least-privilege policies
• Remove admin privileges for daily users

IAM mismanagement is a top cause of security incidents.

Step 3: Clean Up Old Security Groups

Security groups naturally multiply over time and cause:

• Duplicate rules
• Empty/unused SGs
• Insecure 0.0.0.0/0 exposures
• Rules referencing deleted ENIs
• Forgotten test SGs

SG cleanup immediately improves security posture.

Step 4: Delete Unused Load Balancers & Target Groups

These cost money even when idle.
Common examples:

• ALBs without listeners
• Target groups with zero registered targets
• NLBs created during testing
• Duplicate load balancers created by autoscaling rollouts
• Old Classic Load Balancers (CLBs)

Most teams don’t realize idle load balancers cost $18-$30 per month each.

Step 5: Review S3 Buckets for Risks & Waste

S3 becomes messy fast.
Checklist:

• Public bucket access review
• Enable encryption at rest
• Remove incomplete multipart uploads
• Apply lifecycle policies
• Delete old versions
• Remove stale logs & archives
• Ensure no sensitive files in public buckets
• Delete buckets tied to deprecated apps

S3 is a common entry point for breaches, hygiene is critical.

Step 6: Remove Unused EBS Volumes, Snapshots & AMIs

One of the biggest sources of AWS waste:

• Detached EBS volumes
• Snapshots created by old CI/CD jobs
• AMIs from discontinued deployments
• Old launch template versions
• Unused RDS snapshots
• A single old snapshot can cost $10–$50 per month. Cleaning these up often reduces monthly bills by 20–40%.

Step 7: Evaluate Old Lambda Versions & Layers

Most teams forget:

• Every deployment creates a new version
• Versions accumulate endlessly
• Layers become stale
• Provisioned concurrency remains allocated
• Dead-letter queues fill silently

Cleaning Lambda reduces clutter and improves cold-start predictability.

Step 8: Fix CloudWatch Logs & Retention Policies

CloudWatch is a silent cost killer.
AWS defaults log retention to “forever” so logs accumulate endlessly.
Fixes:

• Set retention policies (30-90 days is typical)
• Delete unused log groups
• Consolidate log structures
• Remove log streams tied to deleted Lambdas
• Archive infrequently accessed logs to S3

This cleanup alone can reduce CloudWatch costs by 50–80%.

Step 9: Audit Certificates & Domain Configurations

Expired certificates are a major outage trigger.
Checklist:

• Delete unused ACM certificates
• Rotate certificates expiring in <30 days
• Remove old Route 53 hosted zones
• Verify DNS records are corect
• Clean up stale subdomains
• Remove test domains

Result: fewer outages, less operational overhead.

Step 10: Review Billing, Cost Anomalies & Hidden Charges

Look for:

• Unattached EIPs
• NAT gateways with little traffic
• Idle RDS instances
• Idle OpenSearch clusters
• DynamoDB tables with no reads/writes
• Old CloudFront distributions
• EKS node groups scaling to zero incorrectly
• Elastic Beanstalk environments left running You’d be shocked how much “forgotten” infrastructure companies pay for.

4. Automation: How to Avoid Mess in the Future

A clean AWS account stays clean only with:

• Organization-wide tagging policies
• Terraform/CloudFormation instead of console clicking
• AWS Config rules enforcing guardrails
• Scheduled cleanup tasks (Lambda/Custodian)
• Automated drift detection
• IAM Access Analyzer
• Centralized dashboards (Steampipe, CloudMapper)
• Continuous cost monitoring Cloud hygiene should be a monthly routine, not an annual panic.

5. Tools That Strengthen AWS Hygiene

The best tools for AWS cleanup:

• AWS Native Tools
• AWS Config
• Trusted Advisor
• IAM Access Analyzer
• Resource Explorer
• Cost Explorer
• CloudTrail Lake
• Security Hub

Open Source Tools

• Cloud Custodian – enforce cleanup policies
• Prowler – security & compliance checks
• CloudMapper – environment mapping
• Steampipe – SQL queries across AWS resources

These tools turn cleanup into a predictable workflow.

6. Key Stats & Industry Insights (With Valid Sources)

• 37% of cloud spend is wasted due to idle or over-provisioned resources. - Flexera State of Cloud Report 2024 https://info.flexera.com/SLO-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud-2024
• 90% of organizations experience security risks due to poor IAM hygiene. - CyberArk Identity Security Threat Landscape Report 2024 https://www.cyberark.com/resources/identity-security-threat-landscape-repor
• Unused EBS volumes account for up to 25% of AWS waste. - CloudZero AWS Cost Analysis https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/aws-cost-mistakes/
• 54% of companies experienced outages caused by expired certificates. - Venafi Machine Identity Report https://venafi.com/resources/

7. FAQs

Q: Is it safe to delete orphaned resources?
A: Yes but snapshot first if unsure.

Q: How often should cleanup be performed?
A: Monthly hygiene + quarterly deep audit.

Q: What should be cleaned first?
A: Start with IAM, EBS, S3, and CloudWatch, they have the biggest impact.

Q: Should I automate resource cleanup?
A: Yes, but only after establishing tagging and ownership maturity.

Key Takeaways

• AWS accounts naturally get messy — cleanup is essential
• Untagged, unowned resources are the biggest source of waste
• IAM, EBS, SGs, and CloudWatch need regular maintenance
• Certificate and DNS hygiene prevent outages
• Automated policies ensure long-term health
• Regular hygiene = reduced cost + improved security + better reliability

9. Conclusion

Cloud environments accumulate debris just like codebases accumulate technical debt.
A messy AWS account isn’t a failure — it’s a sign of growth, iteration, and organizational complexity.

The key is to build a culture of cloud hygiene:

• Regular Audits
• Strict Tagging
• Least Privilege
• Lifecycle Policies
• Automation Where Possible

A clean AWS environment improves security, cost efficiency, reliability, and developer confidence.

Your cloud is production, treat it like it.

About the Author: Nilesh is a Lead DevOps Engineer at AddWebSolution, specializing in automation, CI/CD, and cloud scalability.