Stack IDs, Names & Selection

CDK Express Pipeline leverages a consistent and predictable naming convention for Stack IDs. A Stack ID consists of the Wave, Stage and original Stack ID, enabling you to target Waves, Stages or individual stacks for deployment.

Stack names

Stack names are not the same as Stack IDs. Stack names are the human-readable identifiers you assign to your stacks, they are the names you see in the AWS CloudFormation Console.

Info

Stack names default to the stack ID if not specified, but we set it explicitly to a specific pattern that includes the Wave and Stage information for easy selection.

Stack IDs

Stacks IDs follow the pattern: {Wave}_{Stage}_{Stack}

This naming convention allows you to easily select and deploy specific waves, stages, or individual stacks using the CDK CLI.

Selection Patterns

Given the Stack ID naming convention, let’s see an example of how you can select specific waves, stages, or stacks. We have a CDK application with the following Stack IDs:

Wave1_Stage1_StackA
Wave1_Stage1_StackB
Wave1_Stage1_StackC
Wave1_Stage2_StackD

Wave2_Stage1_StackE
Wave2_Stage1_StackF

To target a deployment for all the stacks in a Wave Wave1, you can use:

cdk deploy 'Wave1_*' ...

To target all stacks in a stage of a wave, such as Wave1_Stage1, you can use:

cdk deploy 'Wave1_Stage1_*' ...

To deploy a specific stack, such as Wave1_Stage1_StackA, you can use:

cdk deploy 'Wave1_Stage1_StackA' ...

Important

When targeting specific stacks be sure to pass the --exclusively flag to the cdk deploy command to only deploy the specified stacks and not its dependencies.

Benefits of selecting a specific Wave, Stage or Stack over the all '**' method:

• While developing, you can speed up deployments from your local machine by deploying only what you are working on.
• When running in a CI/CD pipeline, you can target specific waves or stages to deploy only what has changed.
• When deploying with a CI/CD system, you can have additional logic between them. For example, you can place a manual approval step between Wave1 and Wave2.