Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Deleting a Compartment

Delete a compartment from an IAM tenancy.

To delete a compartment, it must be empty of all resources. Before you initiate deleting a compartment, ensure that you have moved, deleted, or terminated all its resources, including any policies attached to the compartment.

The delete action is asynchronous and initiates a work request. The state of the compartment changes to Deleting while the work request is executing. It typically takes several minutes for the work request to complete. While it's in the Deleting state, the compartment isn't displayed in the compartment picker. If the work request fails, the compartment isn't deleted and it returns to the Active state.

After a compartment is deleted, its state is updated to Deleted and a random string of characters is appended to its name, for example, CompartmentA might become CompartmentA.qR5hP2BD. Renaming the compartment allows you to reuse the original name for a different compartment. The deleted compartment is displayed on the Compartments page for 90 days before it's removed from the compartment picker. If any policy statements reference the deleted compartment, the name in the policy statement is updated to the new name.

If you have problems deleting a compartment, see Compartment Fails to Delete.

    1. Open the navigation menu and click Identity & Security. Under Identity, click Compartments. A list of the compartments in your tenancy is displayed.
    2. For the compartment you want to delete, click the Actions menu (Actions Menu), and then select Delete.
    3. At the prompt, click OK.
      A work request is submitted to delete the compartment. The compartment state changes to Deleting. If the work request fails, the state returns to Active.

  • Use the delete command and required parameters to delete a compartment:

    oci iam compartment delete --compartment-id compartment_ocid

    For a complete list of parameters and values for CLI commands, see the CLI Command Reference.

  • Run the DeleteCompartment operation to delete a compartment.