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cdkd

VPC route DependsOn relaxation (default-on)

cdkd deploy drops the CDK-injected defensive DependsOn edges from VPC Lambdas (and adjacent IAM Role / Policy / Lambda::Url / EventSourceMapping resources) onto the private subnet's DefaultRoute / RouteTableAssociation so that downstream consumers — most notably CloudFront::Distribution whose Origin is a Lambda Function URL — can dispatch in parallel with NAT Gateway stabilization.

This is on by default. The relaxation is safe because all deploy-time consumers of a VPC Lambda accept it in Pending state: CreateFunctionUrlConfig / AddPermission / CreateEventSourceMapping all succeed before ENI provisioning finishes, and cdkd's existing post-CreateFunction State=Active wait is already moved to CustomResourceProvider.sendRequest (the one consumer that synchronously invokes the function).

To opt out:

cdkd deploy --no-aggressive-vpc-parallel

When you'd want to opt out: a stack with a Custom Resource that synchronously invokes a VPC Lambda outside cdkd's Lambda-ServiceToken Active wait (e.g. through SNS or via a Step Functions task), where you want the strict CDK ordering to guarantee the NAT route is up before the function is hit. Most stacks don't need this — cdkd's Custom Resource provider already handles the standard Lambda-ServiceToken case.

Critical-path effect on a VPC + Lambda + CloudFront stack:

Mode Critical path Total
--no-aggressive-vpc-parallel NAT 2–3 min → Lambda → Lambda::Url → CF 3 min (serial) ~6 min
default max(NAT, CF) (parallel) ~3 min

Measured −54.6% on tests/integration/bench-cdk-sample (398.59s with --no-aggressive-vpc-parallel → 181.03s default).

Note: the "CF 3 min" leg above is the Deployed wait, which now applies only under --full-wait — on the current default the CloudFront leg returns in seconds and the critical path is NAT alone. The measured numbers were taken with the then-default Deployed wait; the relaxation still matters under --full-wait and for the in-background propagation start time.

Type-pair allowlist (only DependsOn edges matching one of these pairs are dropped — Ref / GetAtt edges and DependsOn outside the list are untouched):

Depender (from) Dependee (to)
AWS::IAM::Role AWS::EC2::Route / AWS::EC2::SubnetRouteTableAssociation
AWS::IAM::Policy AWS::EC2::Route / AWS::EC2::SubnetRouteTableAssociation
AWS::Lambda::Function AWS::EC2::Route / AWS::EC2::SubnetRouteTableAssociation
AWS::Lambda::Url AWS::EC2::Route / AWS::EC2::SubnetRouteTableAssociation
AWS::Lambda::EventSourceMapping AWS::EC2::Route / AWS::EC2::SubnetRouteTableAssociation

Implementation: src/analyzer/cdk-defensive-deps.ts + src/analyzer/dag-builder.ts (gated by the relaxCdkVpcDefensiveDeps DagBuilderOptions flag, set on the deploy code path only — destroy ordering is unaffected).

Trade-off: if a Lambda's async ENI provisioning fails after the deploy has already started a CloudFront CreateDistribution against its Function URL, the rollback has to delete both — and CloudFront delete is also ~5 min. The opt-out exists for stacks where the user wants to keep that worst case off the table.

The relaxation is deploy-only. cdkd destroy is unaffected — the route DependsOn doesn't constrain delete-time correctness (Lambda hyperplane ENI release is the actual destroy bottleneck and is handled separately by lambda-vpc-deps.ts).

--no-capture-observed-state

cdkd deploy records each resource's AWS-current properties into ResourceState.observedProperties (state schema version: 3) immediately after the create/update succeeds, by calling provider.readCurrentState() fire-and-forget. The deploy critical path does NOT block on these — the in-flight set is drained right before the final state save, so the cost is roughly max(per-resource readCurrentState latency), around 200–300ms in practice. Without this, cdkd drift can only compare against properties (= what the user templated), and console-side changes to keys the user did not template are silently ignored.

# Skip the observedProperties capture (default ON since v0.47.0)
cdkd deploy --no-capture-observed-state

# Pin in cdk.json so every deploy in the project skips the capture
# {
#   "context": {
#     "cdkd": { "captureObservedState": false }
#   }
# }

When the capture is off, drift detection falls back to the pre-version: 3 behavior — only state-recorded properties are compared. Use the flag when deploy speed is more important than rich drift detection. The escape-hatch order is: --no-capture-observed-state (CLI) overrides cdk.json context.cdkd.captureObservedState (project) overrides the default true.

v2 → v3 schema upgrade flow

When cdkd deploy loads state and finds resources without observedProperties (typical the first time you deploy after upgrading from cdkd <0.49 / state schema version: 2), it kicks off provider.readCurrentState for each in parallel with the rest of the deploy and drains the result into state at the final save. The deploy critical path does NOT wait on these — cost is bounded by the longest single readCurrentState (~200-300ms in practice), once. Subsequent deploys are unaffected. Honors --no-capture-observed-state (skips both regular capture and this upgrade refresh).

cdkd state refresh-observed <stack> remains the manual / non-deploy path — useful when you want to refresh the baseline without redeploying (e.g. for resources that won't change in any near-future deploy).

--prefix-user-supplied-names (and deprecated --no-prefix-user-supplied-names)

cdkd creates AWS resources with the exact name you declared in CDK code by default. new iam.Role(this, 'CRRole', { roleName: 'my-role' }) in stack MyStack produces an AWS resource named my-role, consistent across every resource type. This is the default since v0.94.0.

Pre-v0.94.0 cdkd prepended the stack name to user-declared physical names on a subset of types only (Pattern B providers: IAM Role / User / Group / InstanceProfile / ELBv2 LoadBalancer / TargetGroup), while Pattern A providers (Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, etc.) used the user's name as-is. The inconsistency was opaque to users; cdkd export surfaced it because the CFn IMPORT identifier check would reject a synth template whose RoleName: 'my-role' didn't match the AWS-deployed MyStack-my-role. Flipping the default brings every resource type into line out of the box.

--prefix-user-supplied-names opts BACK in to legacy prefixing on Pattern B providers (matching pre-v0.94.0 cdkd). Auto-generated names (where the user did NOT declare a physical name) keep the prefix regardless of the flag: those names rely on the prefix for cross-stack uniqueness.

# Pass per-invocation (opt back in to legacy prefixing)
cdkd deploy --prefix-user-supplied-names

# Set per-shell
export CDKD_PREFIX_USER_SUPPLIED_NAMES=true
cdkd deploy

# Pin per-project in cdk.json
# {
#   "context": {
#     "cdkd": { "prefixUserSuppliedNames": true }
#   }
# }

Resolution chain (highest wins): --prefix-user-supplied-names CLI flag → CDKD_PREFIX_USER_SUPPLIED_NAMES=true env var → cdk.json context.cdkd.prefixUserSuppliedNames: true → default false (= skip prefix, the v0.94.0 default).

Deprecated: --no-prefix-user-supplied-names

The --no-prefix-user-supplied-names CLI flag (plus the CDKD_NO_PREFIX_USER_SUPPLIED_NAMES env var and cdk.json context.cdkd.noPrefixUserSuppliedNames) is still accepted but now matches the default since v0.94.0. Setting any of them emits a deprecation warning and has no effect on the resolved name. Pre-v0.94.0 this was how you opted in to skipping the prefix; that opt-in is now the default.

Remove the flag / env var / cdk.json entry from your config. If you need to RESTORE pre-v0.94.0 legacy prefixing (e.g. migrating an existing stack without replacement), use the new --prefix-user-supplied-names opposite-direction flag instead.

Granularity, storage, mid-flight reversibility

  • Granularity: per-deploy. The flag is consulted once at command start and applied to every per-resource name generation in that deploy via an AsyncLocalStorage-scoped value.
  • Storage: the flag controls what AWS resource cdkd asks AWS to create, not what cdkd records in state — once the AWS resource is named, the same name is recorded as physicalId in state. Flipping the flag after the fact does NOT rename an already-deployed resource.
  • Mid-flight reversibility: flipping the flag on an existing stack causes the next deploy to propose REPLACEMENT on every Pattern B resource (IAM Role / User / Group / InstanceProfile / ELBv2 LB / TG) that uses a user-declared name — the existing AWS resource has one name; the new template intent has the other. The v0.94.0 default flip is a one-time instance of this: upgrading from a pre-v0.94.0 cdkd against an existing stack will propose replacement unless you pin --prefix-user-supplied-names.

Affected resource types

The flag only changes behavior for resource types whose pre-v0.94.0 code path prefixed user-supplied names (Pattern B providers). Pattern A providers were always unprefixed and are unchanged by the flag.

Pattern New default (v0.94.0+) --prefix-user-supplied-names (legacy opt-in)
Pattern B: IAM Role, IAM User, IAM Group, IAM InstanceProfile, ELBv2 LoadBalancer, ELBv2 TargetGroup Unprefixed (my-role) Prefixed (MyStack-my-role)
Pattern A: Lambda Function, S3 Bucket, SNS Topic, SQS Queue, DynamoDB Table, Logs LogGroup, Events Rule, etc. Unprefixed (my-bucket) No effect (already unprefixed)
Auto-generated names (any type, no user-supplied physical name) Prefixed (MyStack-LogicalId-<hash>) No effect — prefix kept for uniqueness

Migration from pre-v0.94.0

For a stack already deployed under the pre-v0.94.0 default (Pattern B resources have stack-name-prefixed physical names in AWS), the first cdkd deploy on v0.94.0+ proposes REPLACEMENT on every Pattern B resource — the AWS-deployed name MyStack-my-role no longer matches the new template intent my-role. Three options, listed by preference:

  1. Pin --prefix-user-supplied-names to keep the legacy behavior for that stack. Most conservative — no AWS resources touched.
  2. Accept the one-time REPLACEMENT — the deploy-time pre-flight prompt (see next subsection) lists every affected resource and defaults to no, so the side effect is explicit.
  3. Drop the explicit roleName / userName / ... in CDK code, letting CDK auto-generate the name. Also a one-time REPLACEMENT, but the new name is then stable across future deploys.

A state-side rename helper (cdkd state rename-strip-prefix <stack>) that would migrate state to match AWS without REPLACEMENT is planned but not yet implemented.

Migration: deploy-time warning when the flag flips an existing stack

Flipping --no-prefix-user-supplied-names on against a stack already deployed under the legacy prefix convention causes cdkd's diff path to silently propose REPLACEMENT on every affected Pattern B resource — the AWS-deployed name is MyStack-my-role and the new template intent is my-role, so the diff classifies the name as an immutable property change and the resource is destroyed and re-created. To make this side effect visible up front, cdkd deploy runs a pre-flight migration check: when the flag is on AND the existing state contains one or more Pattern B resources whose recorded physicalId is EXACTLY the legacy auto-prefixed form of the user-supplied name (${stackName}-${userSuppliedName}), the command lists them and prompts for confirmation before any provider call runs. The exact-match test (not a bare "starts with ${stackName}-") is deliberate: a user-supplied name that itself starts with the stack name — e.g. setting roleName to ${this.stackName}-role, a common convention — is taken verbatim, so its physicalId already equals the user name. There is no rename and no replacement, so it is NOT flagged (a bare prefix-strip would otherwise mis-predict MyStack-role to role and block routine in-place updates). The prompt defaults to no because the side effect is destructive; pass -y / --yes (the global CDK CLI parity flag) to skip the prompt in CI / non-interactive runs. If the user declines, the deploy exits cleanly with no resources modified — nothing has been touched yet.

The check runs on the state cdkd reads immediately after acquiring the stack lock (it does not issue a second, pre-lock read of the same object), so the stack lock is briefly held while the prompt is open and is released as soon as it is answered either way. Reading under the lock also means the check sees exactly the state the diff will consume — no concurrent deploy can change it in between.

Example output:

WARNING: --no-prefix-user-supplied-names will REPLACE 2 resource(s) whose
AWS physical name is still prefixed with the stack name:
  - MyRole (AWS::IAM::Role): MyStack-my-role -> my-role
  - MyLb (AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::LoadBalancer): MyStack-my-lb -> my-lb
These resources will be REPLACED because the new naming convention drops
the stack-name prefix.

Continue? (y/N):

The check is a no-op on a first-time deploy (no state to migrate), when no Pattern B resource is still prefixed (e.g. the stack was originally deployed with the flag on), or when the flag is off.

Per-resource timeout

Both cdkd deploy and cdkd destroy (including cdkd state destroy) enforce a wall-clock deadline on every individual CREATE / UPDATE / DELETE so a stuck Cloud Control polling loop, hung Custom Resource handler, or slow ENI release cannot block the run forever.

Option Default Description
--resource-warn-after <duration_or_type=duration> 5m Warn when a single resource operation has been running longer than this. The live progress line is suffixed with [taking longer than expected, Nm+] and a WARN log line is emitted (printed above the live area in TTY mode, plain stderr otherwise). Repeatable.
--resource-timeout <duration_or_type=duration> 30m Abort a single resource operation that exceeds this. The deploy / destroy fails with ResourceTimeoutError (wrapped in ProvisioningError) and the existing rollback / state-preservation path runs. Repeatable.

Durations are written as <number>s, <number>m, or <number>h (e.g. 30s, 90s, 5m, 1.5h). Zero, negative, missing-unit, and unknown-unit values are rejected at parse time.

Both flags accept either form on each invocation:

  • Bare duration (30m) sets the global default. The last bare value wins.
  • TYPE=DURATION (AWS::CloudFront::Distribution=1h) adds a per-resource-type override that supersedes the global default for that type only.

TYPE must look like AWS::Service::Resource; malformed types are rejected at parse time. warn < timeout is enforced both globally and per-type — so --resource-warn-after AWS::X=10m --resource-timeout AWS::X=5m is a parse-time error.

When the user passes --resource-timeout (global or per-type) shorter than the inherited 5m --resource-warn-after default and does NOT pass a matching --resource-warn-after, cdkd auto-lowers the warn-after to min(5m, 0.5 * timeout) and emits a WARN log line naming the lowered value. This closes the UX gap where a --resource-timeout 2m invocation would otherwise fail every resource at runtime with InvalidResourceDeadlineError: warnAfterMs must be less than timeoutMs. Passing both flags explicitly disables the auto-lowering — a reversed explicit pair is a hard parse-time error.

# Surface "still running" warnings sooner on a fast-feedback dev loop
cdkd deploy --resource-warn-after 90s --resource-timeout 10m

# Keep the global default tight, raise it only for resources known to take longer
cdkd deploy \
  --resource-timeout 30m \
  --resource-timeout AWS::CloudFront::Distribution=1h \
  --resource-timeout AWS::RDS::DBCluster=1h30m

# Force Custom Resources to abort earlier than their 1h self-reported polling cap
cdkd deploy --resource-timeout AWS::CloudFormation::CustomResource=5m

Why the default is 30m, not 1h

cdkd's Custom Resource provider polls async handlers (isCompleteHandler pattern) for up to one hour before giving up. Setting the per-resource timeout to 1h by default would make a single hung non-CR resource hold the whole stack for an hour even though no other resource type ever needs more than a few minutes. The 30m global default catches stuck operations faster.

For Custom Resources specifically, the provider self-reports its 1h polling cap to the engine via the getMinResourceTimeoutMs() interface — the deploy engine resolves the per-resource budget as max(provider self-report, --resource-timeout global), so CR resources get their full hour automatically without the user having to remember --resource-timeout 1h. To force CR to abort earlier than its self-reported cap, pass an explicit per-type override (--resource-timeout AWS::CloudFormation::CustomResource=5m). Per-type overrides always win over the provider's self-report — they're the documented escape hatch.

Both DynamoDB types (AWS::DynamoDB::Table, AWS::DynamoDB::GlobalTable) self-report 30 minutes for the same reason — their DELETE path stacks several polling waits (replica removal, an index-settle gate, an index-busy DeleteTable retry, a confirm-gone wait) that share ONE allowance sized to fit inside it. At the default --resource-timeout 30m this changes nothing. Note the self-report is per TYPE, not per operation, so lowering the global default below 30m for fail-fast CI (--resource-timeout 5m) does NOT shorten these types' CREATE or UPDATE deadline either; the per-type override (--resource-timeout AWS::DynamoDB::Table=5m) is the way to get the shorter deadline back.

A handful of resource types are ALSO known to be slow to create or delete regardless of provider — an AWS::OpenSearchService::Domain deletion routinely runs 15-30 minutes, and Redshift / ElastiCache / RDS clusters are the same class. cdkd carries a built-in 60-minute floor for these (src/provisioning/slow-cc-operation-timeouts.ts), folded into the same max(...) resolution above, so a default cdkd destroy waits long enough for the delete to actually finish instead of aborting mid-delete. The same floor lifts the Cloud Control provider's internal poll cap (a flat 15 minutes otherwise), so a Cloud-Control-routed slow delete is not cut off before the outer deadline. An explicit --resource-timeout <TYPE>=<DURATION> override still wins.

The flag reaches SDK-provider inner waiters the same way: under --full-wait, the ECS Service steady-state waiter's 600s cap is lifted to max(600s, resolved --resource-timeout) and the CloudFront Distribution Deployed wait budget to max(20min, resolved --resource-timeout) (see --full-wait), so the inner waiters can never abort before the outer per-resource deadline the same flag raised.

The error message on timeout names the resource, type, region, elapsed time, and operation, and reminds you that long-running resources self-report their needed budget — when you see CR time out, the cause is genuinely the handler, not too-tight a default:

Resource MyBucket (AWS::S3::Bucket) in us-east-1 timed out after 30m during CREATE (elapsed 30m).
This may indicate a stuck Cloud Control polling loop, hung Custom Resource, or
slow ENI provisioning. Re-run with --resource-timeout AWS::S3::Bucket=<DURATION>
to bump the budget for this resource type only, or --verbose to see the
underlying provider activity.

Note: --resource-warn-after must be less than --resource-timeout. Reversed values are rejected at parse time.

CDK annotation messages (synth + deploy)

cdkd synth and cdkd deploy surface CDK Annotations messages with the same semantics as the CDK CLI:

  • Annotations.of(scope).addError(...) — the command prints every error as [Error at /Construct/Path] message, appends Found errors, and exits non-zero without deploying anything. deploy checks the final selection (including auto-included dependency stacks) before any AWS mutation, and an error annotation on a stack outside the selection does not block the deploy — matching cdk deploy semantics.
  • addWarning(...) / addInfo(...) — printed as [Warning at /path] ... / [Info at /path] ...; the run proceeds.

Two flags adjust the failure threshold (CDK CLI parity — both accepted by synth and deploy):

  • --strict — additionally fail when any warning annotation exists (Found warnings (--strict mode), non-zero exit). Info messages never fail. Errors still fail with Found errors (the error check wins when both exist).
  • --ignore-errors — display every message but never fail the run ("Ignores synthesis errors, which will likely produce an invalid deployment" — same caveat as the CDK CLI flag). When combined with --strict, strict wins and warnings/errors fail again (CDK CLI precedence).

cdkd synth checks every synthesized stack (it has no stack selection). Other synth-driven commands (diff, list, import, ...) do not fail on error annotations, matching the upstream CLI. Both cloud-assembly metadata layouts are supported: the inline manifest.json metadata field written by older aws-cdk-lib versions and the <artifactId>.metadata.json side file (additionalMetadataFile) written by current versions.

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