Question

A CloudOps team maintains a large CloudFormation template that has grown to over 400 resources, including a VPC, subnets, security groups, an RDS database, and an ECS cluster. Deployments now frequently fail because the template exceeds resource limits and is hard to maintain. The team wants to break the template into reusable, independently testable components while keeping a single deployment entry point that provisions everything together. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Split the template into separate child templates stored in S3 and reference them from a parent template using nested stacks (AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resources).

Answer

Convert each component into a separate standalone stack and use the AWS CLI to deploy them in sequence with a shell script.

Answer

Use a single CloudFormation StackSet to deploy the components across multiple accounts and regions from one template.

Answer

Export values from each standalone stack with Outputs and import them into other stacks using Fn::ImportValue cross-stack references.