AWS CloudFormation accelerates dev-test cycle with early validation and simplified troubleshooting
AWS CloudFormation now offers capabilities that allow customers to catch deployment errors before resource provisioning begins and resolve them more efficiently. Change set creation now provides early feedback on common deployment errors. Stack events are now grouped by an operation ID with access through the new describe-operation API to accelerate analysis of deployment errors. This empowers developers to reduce deployment cycle times and cut troubleshooting time from minutes to seconds.
When you create a change set, CloudFormation now validates your template against three common failure causes: invalid property syntax, resource name conflict with existing resources in your account, and S3 bucket emptiness constraint on delete operations. If validation fails, the change set status shows ‘FAILED’ with a detailed status on the validation failure. You can then view details for each failure, including the property path associated with them, to pinpoint exactly where issues occur in your template. When you execute a validated change set, the deployment can still fail because of resource-specific runtime errors, such as resource limits or service-specific constraints. For troubleshooting runtime errors, every stack operation now receives a unique ID. You can zoom into the stack events for an operation and filter down to the events that caused the deployment to fail. This allows you to quickly identify root causes, reducing your troubleshooting time.
Get started by creating change sets through the CloudFormation Console, CLI, or SDK. View stack events by operation ID in the CloudFormation Console Events tab or via describe-events API. To learn more, visit the validate deployment and troubleshooting User Guide.