Question

A DevOps team manages a production RDS database and its surrounding networking through a single CloudFormation stack deployed via a CodePipeline. During a routine template update that modifies the DB instance's DBInstanceIdentifier property, the team wants an automated safeguard in the pipeline that halts the deployment BEFORE any resource is replaced, so an engineer can review whether the change would destroy the existing database. Which approach best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Add a stage that creates a CloudFormation change set with the CREATE_CHANGE_SET action, inspect the change set's 'Replacement' field for resources, and gate progression on a manual approval before executing the change set.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the stack so CloudFormation blocks any update that would replace a resource until an administrator disables it.

Answer

Attach a stack policy that denies Update:Replace on the RDS resource, causing the pipeline deployment to pause and prompt for approval when a replacement is attempted.

Answer

Run CloudFormation drift detection at the start of the deploy stage and fail the pipeline if the DB instance shows drift before applying the update.