Teardown

Destroy the Infrastructure

When you are finished exploring the demo, remove all provisioned resources by running terraform destroy. This tears down the Express Gateway Service Express Gateway Service
The aws_ecs_express_gateway_service Terraform resource that provisions an ECS service with managed ALB, auto scaling, and simplified configuration for HTTP/HTTPS web applications and APIs. , the shared ALB Shared ALB
The Application Load Balancer shared by up to 25 Express services in the same VPC using Host header routing rules. , networking components, IAM roles, and the ECS cluster in the correct dependency order.

terraform destroy

Terraform prompts for confirmation before proceeding. Type yes to confirm. The destroy operation removes resources in reverse dependency order — the Express Gateway Service and its managed ALB are removed first, followed by IAM roles, security groups, subnets, and the VPC VPC
Virtual Private Cloud — an isolated virtual network within AWS where resources are deployed. .

Note

The destroy operation typically takes 3–5 minutes. The longest wait is for the ALB and target group to drain connections before deletion.

Verify Resource Removal

After terraform destroy completes, confirm Terraform no longer tracks any resources:

terraform state list

The command should produce no output. If any resources are listed, run terraform destroy again to remove them.

Tip

You can also confirm in the ECS and EC2 consoles that the cluster, Express service, and load balancer are gone.

Troubleshooting Destroy Failures

If terraform destroy fails or hangs, common causes include:

Symptom	Cause	Resolution
Timeout waiting for ALB deletion	Active connections draining	Wait for drain to complete or manually deregister targets
VPC deletion fails	Dependent resources still exist (ENIs, security group references)	Remove dependent resources first, then retry destroy
IAM role deletion fails	Role still attached to running tasks	Stop all tasks in the cluster, then retry destroy