@aws-community/ephemeral

Formerly @aws-community/self-destruct.

⚠️ This construct is designed to delete your CDK Stack after a specified amount of time! Use at your own risk! ⚠️

Version 2.1.0

In version 2, we expanded the concept based on this blog post: Destroy THEIR Stacks - Ephemeral CDK Stacks as a Service

For teams that want to centrally manage destruction, we deploy a central DestroyerStack that subscribes to CloudFormation deployment events. If the CloudFormation stack includes a STACK_LIFE tag, an entry is added to the Destroyer DyanmoDB Table with a ttl of the stack life (current time + stack life). When the item is removed from the table because of the ttl, the stack target stack gets destroyed. This helps reduce resources by not having one state machine for each ephemeral stack.

With version 2, if you want a centrally managed destruction... first you need to deploy the DestroyerStack, and then you can either extend the DestroyMeStack stack, or add the DestroyMeConstruct into your existing stacks. Both take properties to set the "stack life" duration. See the blog post for more information.

Old Version

Blog Post: Say Goodbye to Your CDK Stacks: A Guide to Self-Destruction

This project publishes an npm library that contains a CDK Stack and CDK Construct that will self-destruct the Stack at a defined interval since the last deployment.

The Step Function:

1. Lists the current running executions of itself
2. Stops old iterations
3. Waits for the specified duration
4. Deletes the stack after the "wait"

In the event that the CloudFormation stack was already being deleted, it will gracefully exit.

You can use this in your projects in two ways:

• Extending the Stack
• Using the Construct

Extending the Stack

To build this into your stacks... you can simply extend the stack:

export interface MyStackProps extends SelfDestructStackProps {};
export class MyStack extends SelfDestructStack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props: MyProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);
  }
}

By default the self destruct construct is DISABLED. You have to explicitly enable it by passing in the selfDestructEnabled: true. You can also override the duration with the selfDestructDuration property.

Installing the construct

If instead you want to install this into an existing stack, you can!

export class MyStack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string) {
    super(scope, id);
    new SelfDestructConstruct(this, 'SelfDestruct', {
      duration: Duration.days(7), // a duration is required
    });
  }
}

The Aspect

In version 1.1.0, I added a CDK Aspect that ensures all resources have a removal policy set to destroy (it does this automatically).

It also identifies Buckets that do NOT have autoDeleteObjects: true set (including Level 1 CfnBuckets). For those it throws an error during synth.