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francotel

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๐ŸงŸโ€โ™‚๏ธ The Zombie Server That Wouldnโ€™t Die ๐Ÿ’€

๐Ÿ•› The Midnight Nightmare

It was midnight at SpookyCloud Inc.. The office was dark, and the only light came from Bobโ€™s laptop screen. He was tired, ready to go home when suddenly...

๐Ÿ”” Slack Alert: "EC2 instance terminated"

"Finally," Bob sighed. That old server was deleted weeks ago.

ec2-terminated

But then...

๐Ÿ”” Slack Alert: "EC2 instance running"

Bobโ€™s heart skipped a beat. "No... no way," he whispered.

He opened the AWS console โ€” there it was, running again. He stopped it once more.

๐Ÿ”” Slack Alert: "EC2 instance running"

๐Ÿ˜จ The server was back... again.

๐Ÿ’€ The Monster Grows Stronger

Every time Bob stopped the server, it returned โ€” stronger and angrier. The CPU usage climbed higher, draining resources like a hungry beast.

Bob checked the logs... nothing. No deployments, no cron jobs. It was as if the server had a mind of its own.

He grabbed his keyboard and typed:

aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --filters "Name=instance-state-name,Values=running" \
  --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,Tags]'
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๐Ÿ“‹ The result? No tags. No owner. No clues.

"It's a ghost..." Bob muttered.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธ The Forgotten Curse

Digging deeper, Bob discovered the truth โ€” the server belonged to a forgotten Auto Scaling Group from an ex-employee. Each time the server died, the group brought it back to life... like a cursed tomb opening again and again.

Bobโ€™s fingers shook as he ran this final command:

aws autoscaling delete-auto-scaling-group \
  --auto-scaling-group-name "zombie-asg" \
  --force-delete
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โšฐ๏ธ The server was gone. For real this time.

๐Ÿ“œ The Moral of the Story

Like any good fable, Bob learned important lessons that night:

๐ŸงŸโ€โ™‚๏ธ Always tag your resources. A tagless server is a mystery waiting to haunt you.
๐ŸงŸโ€โ™‚๏ธ Clean up old environments. Forgotten test systems may return from the grave.
๐ŸงŸโ€โ™‚๏ธ Review your Auto Scaling Groups. Hidden triggers can summon the undead.
๐ŸงŸโ€โ™‚๏ธ Automate cleanup tasks. Donโ€™t leave ghost servers to haunt your bill.


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