Nuke Your Cloud

This weekend I am spending some time messing around with AWS and Terraform.

It’s really easy to get started with Terraform, and spin up a bunch of AWS resources.

In fact this is all it takes to create a new EC2 instance.

# main.tf
terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 3.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "my_instance" {
  ami = "ami-04f7a54071e74f488"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

With the AWS CLI setup, simply running terraform init, terraform plan and terraform apply will deploy this resource.

The Problem

I’m just messing around with a test project. I am spinning up difference sources just to see what get’s created.

But when it comes to tearing things down, terraform destroy doesn’t always completely remove everything that gets made.

There’s often a bunch of other “stuff” left over. Security groups, subnets, all sorts.

And I don’t want to have to go throuhg all of my AWS resources to delete that stuff. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe they’re 100% free… But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to just delete everything?

Enter Cloud Nuke

This is the tool for the job. Simply run brew install cloud-nuke, and then cloud-nuke aws and watch it go to work.

Obviously it goes without saying: make sure you’re running this on the right AWS account. Please don’t nuke something important.

You’ll likely want to only have cloud-nuke search the region that you care about, otherwise a full scan can take upwards of 30+ minutes.

That’s it. Quick and easy. A great tool for the job.

As always, get busy building.