How do I prevent deletion of S3 buckets?

Question

It looks like creating a bucket policy might do the trick, but I am having trouble creating the policy.

Answer 1

The AWS Policy Generator is a very helpful tool for the exploration and creation of such policies, its usage is explained in the respective introductory blog post (a direct link to it it is meanwhile available alongside most policy entry forms within the AWS Management Console as well).

I've created an example according to your specification (make sure to generate a new one for your own resources of course):

{
  "Id": "ExamplePolicyId12345678",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "ExampleStmtSid12345678",
      "Action": [
        "s3:DeleteBucket"
      ],
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::test-example-com",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": [
          "*"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Please note that the AWS Management Console currently neither hides the delete command nor reports on its execution being unsuccessful for buckets with such policies, however, the bucket remains in place ;)