CloudFormation without prefix/suffix in resource names (i.e. CloudWatch Log Groups)

Question

I'm creating a stack with CloudFormation. When you create log groups, it automatically adds prefixes and suffixes to my log group names. For example, if I try to create log group MyLogGroup , it creates log group my-stack-name-MyLogGroup-EEWJYSCJRK2V .

I understand that for a lot of use cases, this might be desired to differentiate the same resources for different stacks. However, my team has different accounts for our different stacks, so there will be no overlap. Having dynamic prefixes and suffixes makes it hard to reference log groups from static files (ie CloudWatch Logs agent config file).

Is there a way to make sure that resources get named EXACTLY what I put and not add a prefix or suffix?

Answer 1

We have run into this same issue with our AWS ecosystem and after speaking to several folks at AWS, this is by design and is not modifiable right now.

Depending on the complexity of what you are trying to do, I would recommend replacing CloudFormation with some Lambda functions to manage the resources (can be done cross account with sts:AssumeRole).

Answer 2

Yes its possible. For instance in our cloud formation template we create the cloud watch conf file with log_group_name and log_stream_name parameter set to combination of different parameters. Our log groups are created without prefix and postfix. See following example:

"log_group_name = "MyLogGroup\n",
"log_stream_name = {instance_id}/", "MyLogGroup", ".log\n",