AWS Breaks
Brakes for an AWS account: pause every running service to stop the bill, without deleting anything.
- When
- Jan 2026
- Role
- Builder
- Outcome
- Open-source CLI, installable with pip
- Built with
- Python, AWS (EC2, RDS, ECS, Lambda), CloudFormation
Why I started
When an AWS bill runs away, the usual fix, aws-nuke, deletes everything. I wanted an emergency brake that pauses spending and lets you resume exactly where you were.
What I did
I built a command-line tool: run aws hit breaks to stop EC2 instances and RDS databases, scale ECS services to zero, suspend Auto Scaling groups, and remove Lambda provisioned concurrency. Run it with --resume to put everything back.
It shows estimated monthly savings, has a dry-run mode to preview changes, and runs under a dedicated IAM role with minimal permissions, set up by a CloudFormation template.
Progress so far
It's open source under the MIT license and installs with pip install aws-hit-breaks.