Can AWS EC2 Instances “Exist” Without Any Volumes?

When tearing down an AWS Delphix Trial, we run the following command with Terraform:

>terraform destroy

I’ve mentioned before that every time I execute this command, I suddenly feel like I’m in control of the Death Star in Star Wars:

As this runs outside of the AWS EC2 web interface, you may see some odd information in your dashboard.  In our example, we’ve run “terraform destroy” and the tear down was successful:

So you may go to your volumes and after verifying that yes, no volumes exist:

The instances may still show the three instances that were created as part of the trial, (delphix engine, source and target.)

These are simply “ghosts of instances past.”  The tear down was completely successful and there’s simply a delay before the instance names are removed from the dashboard.  Notice that they no longer are listed with a public DNS or IP address.  This is a clear indication that these aren’t currently running, exist or more importantly, being charged for.

Just one more [little] thing to be aware of… 🙂