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Discussion on: How-to organize CloudFormation stacks to minimize blast radius

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Andrew May

Completely agree about the layered approach. The area where I struggle is whether to split persistent resources up by application or not - it can lead to a lot of stacks if you have many different applications that have a few persistent resources (e.g. an S3 bucket/SQS queue).

As for sharing values between stacks, I still think Exports have value for things that should never change and are fundamental (e.g. VPC resources), but use parameter store mostly for values that might change - especially if the dependent stacks can be lazily updated to use the new value where they'll pick it up on the next update.

I got so sick of parameter files and all the other bits and pieces that you need to configure for a stack when used in a CI/CD process that I wrote a utility to manage the configuration called stackmanager.