Delete an Amazon EC2 security group - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Delete an Amazon EC2 security group

When you are finished with a security group that you created for use with your Amazon EC2 instances, you can delete it.

Requirements

  • The security group can't be associated with an instance or network interface.

  • The security group can't be referenced by a rule in another security group.

To delete a security group using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. (Optional) To verify that your security group is not associated with an instance, do the following:

    1. In the navigation pane, choose Security Groups.

    2. Copy the ID of the security group to delete.

    3. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

    4. In the search bar, add Security group IDs equals filter and paste the ID of the security group. If there are no results, then the security group is not associated with an instance. Otherwise, you must disassociate the security group before you can delete it.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Security Groups.

  4. Select the security group and choose Actions, Delete security groups.

  5. If you selected more than one security group, you are prompted for confirmation. If some of the security groups can't be deleted, we display the status of each security group, which indicates whether it will be deleted. To confirm deletion, enter Delete.

  6. Choose Delete.

To delete a security group using the command line