Question

A platform team maintains a large CloudFormation template that provisions VPC, security, database, and application resources. The single template has grown past 500 resources and repeatedly hits the per-stack resource limit and exceeds the template body size limit during deployment. The team wants to break the template into logically separated components that are still deployed and updated together as one atomic unit, while allowing values (such as subnet IDs and security group IDs) to flow between the components without relying on cross-stack Exports that would block future refactoring. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Refactor the template into nested stacks using AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resources in a root stack, passing values between child stacks via the root stack's parameters and the children's Outputs.

Answer

Split the template into fully independent stacks and use CloudFormation cross-stack references with Export/Fn::ImportValue to share subnet and security group IDs between them.

Answer

Convert the template to a CloudFormation StackSet and deploy each logical component as a separate stack instance across the same account and region.

Answer

Keep a single template but move most resource definitions into an AWS::Include transform macro stored in S3 to bypass the template body size limit.