Question

A DevOps team manages a large application using CloudFormation. They currently use a single monolithic template that provisions a VPC, an RDS database, and an ECS service. The networking team wants to update VPC subnets independently without risking the RDS or ECS resources, while the application team wants to deploy ECS changes frequently. The team decides to split the monolith. They want the VPC to be reusable by multiple unrelated application stacks that are deployed and updated on separate lifecycles, and they must avoid a situation where updating the VPC forces an update or replacement evaluation of the application stacks. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Split the resources into separate root stacks and share the VPC outputs using cross-stack references (Export/ImportValue), so each stack has an independent deployment lifecycle.

Answer

Convert the template into a parent stack with nested stacks for VPC, RDS, and ECS, passing values between them as nested stack parameters.

Answer

Keep a single template but add Conditions and separate change sets so each team executes only its portion of the stack.

Answer

Use a single StackSet that deploys the VPC, RDS, and ECS as three stack instances into the same account and region.