Posted On: Mar 11, 2024

AWS CloudFormation improved its stack creation speed by up to 40% and introduced a new stack creation event, CONFIGURATION_COMPLETE. This event is available at both the stack and resource levels.

When customers create a stack, AWS CloudFormation makes API calls to AWS services to create resources. Previously, CloudFormation emitted two stack event types: CREATE_IN_PROGRESS, signaling the start of resource provisioning, and CREATE_COMPLETE, indicating the end of provisioning. With this launch, CloudFormation will also emit a CONFIGURATION_COMPLETE event while the resource creation is in progress, to signal that CloudFormation created the resource, applied the configuration as defined in the stack template, and began waiting for an eventual consistency check to complete with the underlying AWS service. CloudFormation now leverages this event to begin parallel creation of dependent resources within a stack, providing customers a faster stack creation experience without any changes required. For example, if your stack contains resource B that depends on resource A, CloudFormation will start provisioning resource B when resource A reaches the CONFIGURATION_COMPLETE state. Customers can also directly leverage this event to shortcut their stack creation process in scenarios where a resource consistency check is unnecessary, such as when validating a pre-production stack configuration or starting cross-stack provisioning.

These improvements are available in AWS Regions where AWS CloudFormation is available. Refer to the AWS Region table for details. Visit our blog to learn more about how CloudFormation deployment works.