Question

A DevOps team manages a production VPC, subnets, and an RDS instance that were all created manually through the AWS console over two years ago. Management now requires all infrastructure to be managed as code using CloudFormation so that changes go through the change-set review process. The team must bring these existing, live resources under CloudFormation management WITHOUT deleting them or causing any downtime to the running RDS database. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Author a CloudFormation template that describes the existing resources, then use the resource import operation (create change set with import) to bring the resources into a new or existing stack, matching each logical resource to its physical resource identifier.

Answer

Delete the manually created resources and recreate them by deploying a new CloudFormation stack that defines the VPC, subnets, and RDS instance from scratch.

Answer

Enable drift detection on an empty stack, which will automatically detect the orphaned resources and adopt them into the stack once remediation is applied.

Answer

Add a DeletionPolicy of Retain to a new template and deploy it; CloudFormation will recognize the identically named existing resources and take over their management.