How can resources in a CloudFormation stack that will no longer be pursued be eliminated with the least administrative effort?

Eliminating resources in a CloudFormation stack with the least administrative effort is best achieved by deleting all the resources as a single stack. When you delete a stack in CloudFormation, you effectively remove all the resources that were created as part of that stack in one go. This means you do not have to go through the process of reviewing, managing, or terminating each resource individually, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

By choosing to delete the stack as a whole, you streamline the process, ensuring that all associated resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and other components, are removed in an efficient manner. This approach also maintains the integrity of resource dependencies, as CloudFormation automatically handles the order of deletion based on these dependencies. Thus, it minimizes the risk of resource conflicts or failed deletions that could arise if resources were managed individually or in smaller batches.