You Deleted Everything and AWS Is Still Charging You

The AWS cleanup checklist I wish someone had given me when I was starting out with cloud. I talk to computer science students regularly. There's one fear that comes up more than almost anything else: "I am worried about spinning up stuff in the cloud and charges getting out of control." I used to feel this. Some time ago, I set up a relational database on RDS, some virtual machines as EC2 instances, an S3 bucket to upload some data. After I was done, I deleted everything on the AWS console. Deleted my database. Terminated my instances. Then I got a bill I wasn't expecting. Didn't everything get deleted? Literally AWS told me "deleting" in the console. I didn't think anything was running. What happened? That experience stuck with me. As I work with students building on AWS, I see the exact same thing happen to them. Last semester alone, I heard some version of this story from students. I'm gonna walk us through what's actually going on and give you a checklist to eliminate this fear whe