Question

A DevOps team manages a production application using a single CloudFormation stack that provisions an Amazon RDS database, an S3 bucket containing user uploads, and several stateless compute resources. During a planned refactor, the team must remove the compute resources by deleting and recreating the stack under a new name, but they cannot afford to lose the RDS data or the S3 objects. They also want CloudFormation to leave the existing database and bucket in place — without creating final snapshots that incur extra cost — when the old stack is deleted. Which approach ensures the stateful resources survive the stack deletion with the least operational risk?

Accepted Answer

Add a DeletionPolicy of Retain to the RDS and S3 resources in the template, update the stack to apply it, then delete the old stack.

Answer

Add a DeletionPolicy of Snapshot to both the RDS instance and the S3 bucket, then delete the old stack so recoverable copies remain.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the stack, then delete the stack and confirm that stateful resources are automatically preserved.

Answer

Manually export the RDS data and copy the S3 objects to another bucket before deleting the stack, then re-import them after recreation.