MAKE CLOUDFORMATION ROLLBACKS FASTER AND DONT BLOCK SUBSEQUENTIAL DEPLOYMENTS

[AllanOricil]

Describe the feature

3 minutes to deploy and end up with an error, then a rollback initialized. This rollback took longer than the deploy? why? Is it done manually by an engineer?

Use Case

NOT GET PISSED OFF WITH THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT TAKES TO RETRY A CDK DEPLOYMENT

Proposed Solution

ROLLBACKS could be done instantly if all resources were put on a "trash bin" and later handled by AWS internal services. Why make us wait for you to purge them? Put them on a separate place and handle the deleting afterwards. Consider user initiated deleteion events as the a proof the User agrees to have those resources deleted. I'm extremelly irritaded right now because a simple stack that takes 3 minutes to be deployed took more than 20 minutes to be rolledback. This is a horrible DX.

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CDK version used

2.139

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

macos

[pahud]

Thank you for your feedback and we appreciate it. This is actually not something CDK can do but cloudformation and we suggest submit your feedback to cloudformation. I still have some suggestions for you though to help you accelerate your development cycle from CDK's perspective.

1. Incremental deployments for large stacks - if you have a lot of resources in a single stack, instead of deploying them all at once, try to deploy part of them every single time. This avoids rolling back all deployed resources that could take a long time.
2. Use cdk deploy -R to stop rolling back and continue your deployment from where it failed. This allows you to inspect the failure description and resume at where it failed.
3. If the failed stack has to rollback and it takes a lot of time, instead of waiting for the rollback complete, you can simply change a new stack name in your app.ts and redeploy it as a new stack. For example:

const app = new cdk.App();
new MySampleStack(app, 'my-stack'); // <== change `my-stack` to `my-stack2` and deploy

This allows you to have a separate stack deploying for a very quick inspection while the old one would eventually complete its rollback and stop.

4. Last but not least, we are implementing the cloudformation optimistic stabilization strategy support in CDK CLI and hopefully you will see a huge improvement from the perspective of CDK. See this PR for more details and we welcome your feedback.

I hope you find the tips above useful and enjoy your CDK journey.

[AllanOricil]

@pahud thanks for the insights!

I just got really frustraded yesterday due to the amount of time I had to wait and because I was facing again an error I thought I had already fixed.

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