部署 CloudFormation 模板，而不仅仅是变更集

Question

Context

I manually deleted stacks in an aws account because a particular resource was using an outdated version of Node. Now I'm trying to redeploy the stacks manually. But I am getting <resource type> does not exist errors . My thought so far is that somewhere CF is caching those deleted resources and their associated names/service names. Then when I deploy the stack, a changeset is created where the deleted resources already exist. Then when the changeset is executed, it cannot find the deleted resources, which it thinks still exists resulting in InvalidServiceName errors.

Question

Is there a way to outright deploy an entire CF template, not the changeset?

Effort

I've tried creating "dummy" resources for the changeset to then overwrite. The difficulty is that service names are dynamic, so the changeset still does not find the "dummy" resource because the servicename is not the same.

Answer 1

CloudFormation holds an internal state of the stack, which does not necessarily correspond to the actual situation if you have manually changed or deleted some resources. For some AWS services, you can view how this state is different by looking at the stack drift . I also want to point out that the notion of "applying the stack and not the changeset" is impossible. CloudFormation always uses a changeset, even when it initially deploys the stack, even though this is sometimes obfuscated for the end-user.

I see two possible options to fix this. The first is to delete the stack in its entirety and recreate it completely. CloudFormation might error the first time, since it cannot delete certain resources, but you would be able to retain those resources on a second try. If you select the already deleted resources in the second try, the stack should be deleted after which you can recreate it.

Depending on the situation you would also have a second option. You could delete only the already deleted resources from the stack (eg, by commenting them out and updating the stack) and then redeploy with the lines uncommented again. If this doesn't work since the resources cannot be found, you might have better luck by adding a DeletionPolicy set to retain in a first update, which would prevent CloudFormation from actually deleting (the non-existent) resource.