How to deploy AWS CDK app multiple times?

Question

Is it possible to deploy a CDK app to the same account multiple times? I want to run synth once and the run cdk deploy against that synthesised template multiple times.

I can see that the recent 1.28.0 release of the CDK allows for passing CloudFormation parameters into the deploy command (via #1237). This means I can parameterize the contents of a stack, but I don't know how to change the name/id of the app itself.

For example, here is a simple app:

public class ExampleApp {
    public static void main(final String[] args) {
        App app = new App();

        new ExampleStack(app, "ExampleStack");

        app.synth();
    }
}

and here is a simple do-nothing stack:

public class ExampleStack extends Stack {

    public ExampleStack(final Construct scope, final String id) {
        this(scope, id, null);
    }

    public ExampleStack(final Construct scope, final String id, final StackProps props) {
        super(scope, id, props);

        CfnParameter someVar = CfnParameter.Builder.create(this, "SomeVar")
                .description("Some variable that can be passed in at deploy-time.")
                .type("String")
                .build();

        // rest of stack here
    }
}

I can run cdk synth and output the template somewhere, then run

cdk --app path/to/cdk.out deploy ExampleStack --parameters "ExampleStack:SomeVar=SomeValue"

and the parameter will be passed into the stack at deploy-time.

However, I don't see how to deploy the app multiple times with different names (or ids). Is this possible?

The background to why I want to do this, NOT run synth multiple times, is because for compliance reasons, I need a single artifact - the cdk.out directory - and then deploy that multiple times. To that end, I can't use answers based around multiple runs of synth.

Answer 1

Try this:

1. You need to make your stack name a parameter passed in from the command line
2. remove the app paramter from your cdk.json and specify the app parameter on the command line passing in the "prefix" parameter

Any resources in your stack with with service level names or IDs need to also be modified, for example two stacks can't create a secret with the same name

In my solution I derived from the StackProps object to add a "PrefixName" property to the stack and the prefix can be used within my stack to influence the naming or resources.

My program.cs looks as follows:

using Amazon.CDK;

namespace DevconnectListener
{
    sealed class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var app = new App();
            var props = new DevConnectStackProps()
            {
                PrefixName = args[0],
                StackName = args[0]  + "-DevconnectListenerStack"
            };

            var s = new DevconnectListenerStack(app, "DevconnectListenerStack", props);
            

            app.Synth();
        }
    }
}

Here is my custom DevConnectStackProps class:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using Amazon.CDK;
using Amazon.CDK.AWS.DynamoDB;
using Amazon.CDK.AWS.Lambda;

namespace DevconnectListener
{

    public class DevConnectStackProps : StackProps, IStackProps
    {
        public DevConnectStackProps()
        {

        }
        public string PrefixName { get; set; }
    }
}

My cdk.json look like this, removed the app property:

{
  "context": {
    "@aws-cdk/core:enableStackNameDuplicates": "true",
    "aws-cdk:enableDiffNoFail": "true",
    "@aws-cdk/core:stackRelativeExports": "true"
  }
}

Then there is a CMD file named deploy-dev.cmd (which contains the aws profile i want to use and the dev prefix parameter:

cdk deploy --app "dotnet run -p src/DevconnectListener/DevconnectListener.csproj dev" --profile dev_aws_profile

If you run this again with a different prefix, you'll see a new stack in the CloudFormation console.