Incomplete cleanup / Cost trap

[DC4JG]

The workshop and CDK itself lack information about how to clean up correctly and which cost may occur.

As stated in #126 and ignored for years in aws/aws-cdk#986, the user is left with a DynamoDB table, S3 bucket, CloudWatch logs and CloudFormation stack after finishing the workshop, without knowing about their existence.

This is a dark pattern (some may call it worse) as the user acts in good faith and in compliance with the cleanup section, yet will be left in an unclean state for redeployment and could be charged for resources he thought were destroyed.

I suggest the following steps:

• add a clear warning about potentially occurring costs (upfront, users may not complete the workshop)
• add description how/where to find an overview about all things which will/might create charges (e.g. in AWS Console)
• extend the code examples about information on the RemovalPolicy options
• implement and include the cdk bootstrap --destroy command

[ryparker]

Hey @DC4JG 👋 Thanks for bringing this up.

I agree that this could be confusing for new users and should be improved.

These action items would be a great first issue for anyone looking to contribute:

• add a clear warning about potentially occurring costs (upfront, users may not complete the workshop)
• add description how/where to find an overview about all things which will/might create charges (e.g. in AWS Console)

These action items I believe could be their own issues/PRs and could be implemented after the others:

• extend the code examples about information on the RemovalPolicy options
• implement and include the cdk bootstrap --destroy command

I'm marking this as p1 which means it has been prioritized as important, although please keep in mind that we do have a large number of issues at the moment (across all CDK repos). It may be some time before we are able to solve this particular issue. We use +1s to help us prioritize our work, and as always we are happy to take contributions if anyone is interested to pick this up and submit a PR.

[DC4JG]

Found a general (overkill) solution for all AWS issues regarding incomplete cleanup, borked CDK deployments, being unable to see what is deployed across the globe, generating cost and everything else like e.g. automatically hitting the big red button if something threatens to financially ruin you due to not being able to limit cost efficiently.

The community has created an AWS nuke, use carefully.