Sharing common resources across multiple services stacks

[jimfum]

Trying to figure out the most elegant way to deal with the following situation:

• a couple of services, each in its own git repo with CDK script to deploy itself.
• as these services are part of one system, I want to place them into the same VPC and ECS cluster.

How can a CDK script of each service reference the same VPC and ECS cluster? Solutions that come to mind are based on quite a bit of manual work should one want to deploy the system from scratch. E.g. having a VPC stack and ECS stack in a 'common' git repo, deploy manually, copy & paste resulting VPN & ECS cluster ids to both dependent projects and deploy those. Any better?

Thanks.

[indrora]

We don't give specific guidance on this topic, usually and encourage you to consider how your language (and organization) generally break up the boundaries of your application. So long as you recognize that

• Stacks are not necessarily kept in lockstep: The failure of one stack to deploy does not stop another
• The failure of one stack rolls back that stack alone
• you can reference the resources of another stack as long as it is passed down to the root application in some form

using whatever methods of resource sharing you wish is perfectly acceptable, so long as your application eventually calls synth() to generate the CloudFormation template.

A common way to do this is to have a stack for each portion of your application (i.e. one that holds the shared resources and exposes them for the others) and use the root application to share these with other stacks, parameterizing them into the constructor for a stack.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello! Reopening this discussion to make it searchable.