Posted On: Nov 22, 2021

Today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces the capability to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set. This will let you create resources, applications or environments across your AWS Organization and AWS Regions efficiently. You can subsequently avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually.

With the Import functionality, you can now efficiently replicate your cloud infrastructure described in a CloudFormation template, and manage that infrastructure in a centralized manner across your entire AWS Organization and Regions. You can avoid manually maintaining stacks individually in each Organizational Unit or Region, or having to delete and recreate the existing infrastructure in order to bring a particular stack into the purview of a stack set. For example, you can import security resources such as AWS IAM roles described in CloudFormation into a stack set and then centrally manage and deploy those IAM roles across the entire AWS Organization to achieve a consistent organization-wide security compliance in a scalable manner.

To get started, use the CloudFormation console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs to begin the import process. You can specify the ID of the CloudFormation stack you intend to import to create a new stack set, or to add a stack to an existing stack set. Previously, you could import Stacks into StackSets created using the Self-managed permission model. This launch will allow you to import Stacks into StackSets created using the Service-managed permission model. You can use the StackSets import functionality in all AWS regions where AWS CloudFormation StackSets is currently available. For more information, please refer to the documentation.