Add option to `deploy` that skips waiting for stack change completion.

[commiterate]

Describe the feature

Add an option to the deploy action that lets users skip waiting for stack change completion.

Use Case

Today, stack deployments with the CDK always wait for the stack to enter a terminal state (e.g. CREATE_COMPLETE, UPDATE_COMPLETE, ROLLBACK_COMPLETE) before returning.

This can take a long time (read: hours) for traffic shifting deployments (e.g. CloudFormation rolling update for Auto Scaling groups, CodeDeploy Lambda alias canary deployments).

When used in CI, compute time is mostly spent polling for stack change completion. This can create issues with CI job timeouts and exhaust CI duration quotas or drive up costs.

CloudFormation already supports stack state change notifications with SNS topics. Ideally, users can trigger deployments with the AWS CDK and then rely on stack state change notifications to trigger post-deployment tasks (e.g. resume a CI workflow to run integration tests).

Proposed Solution

Add --wait (default, current behavior) and --no-wait flags which let users skip waiting for stack changes to complete.

Other Information

N/A

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CDK version used

2.1010.0

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Any

[ykethan]

Hey @commiterate, thank you for reaching out. AWS CDK CLI currently supports the following option on cdk deploy which may assist with your use case.

with --method you can configure the method for deployment which may help with CI job timeouts.

with --notification-arns you can pass in existing sns topics Arn's for stack events

Do let us know if this does not address your use case.

[commiterate]

Does the direct deploy method immediately return after getting a success response from UpdateStack? The statement saying "but you lose progress information" isn't particularly clear.

As for SNS topics for notifications, this one's already solved so it's not of concern here (we can configure one on a Stack instance as well).

[commiterate]

Just tried cdk deploy {stack} --method='direct' --require-approval='never'. Direct still shows the entire stack update process and doesn't return until it completes.

[ykethan]

Hey @commiterate, Thank you for providing us clarifying information and providing us feedback, we will work on getting the documentation updated to provide clarifying information.

The cdk deploy --method='direct' would output the stack resources being updated but as the CloudFormation change sets are not being created you would see a reduced deploy time but the following progress will not be visible on the number of resource being updated.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/ref-cli-cmd-deploy.html#ref-cli-cmd-deploy-options

Marking this as p2 feature request.

[commiterate]

Not sure if you can talk about it here, but how's Amazon Pipelines deploying CDK apps? I imagine it's not using the CDK CLI and just taking the cdk.out outputs then doing its own thing (in which case this --no-wait option might help with ASBX's adapter if they rewrite it using the CDK toolkit lib instead).