(aws-cdk): --no-rollback not working as expected

First, thanks for the great PR for the disable rollback feature. I was testing this in my environment and noticed it’s not working as expected and this could be an issue related to cloudformation.

To dive deep into the root cause, I noticed the CDK API will always create change set and then execute the change set with --disable-rollback option, however, execute-change-set --disable-rollback will actually not stop the rollback. And we can reproduce this with AWS CLI so I believe it’s not related to CDK.

Reproduction Steps

1. create a CDK app with bad configuration

cdk synth > template.yaml

1. create change set with AWS CLI

aws cloudformation create-change-set \ 
    --stack-name my-application \
    --change-set-name my-change-set \
    --template-body file://template.yaml \
    --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
    --change-set-type CREATE

1. execute the change set with the --disable-rollback option.

aws cloudformation execute-change-set --change-set-name my-change-set  --disable-rollback

1. describe this stack. The DisableRollback is true.

aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name my-application 

{
    "Stacks": [
        {
            "StackId": "...",
            "StackName": "my-application",
            "ChangeSetId": "...",
            "CreationTime": "2021-09-01T03:48:10.908000+00:00",
            "LastUpdatedTime": "2021-09-01T03:53:55.837000+00:00",
            "RollbackConfiguration": {},
            "StackStatus": "CREATE_IN_PROGRESS",
            "DisableRollback": true,
            "NotificationARNs": [],
            "Capabilities": [
                "CAPABILITY_IAM"
            ],
            "Tags": [],
            "EnableTerminationProtection": false,
            "DriftInformation": {
                "StackDriftStatus": "NOT_CHECKED"
            }
        }
    ]
}

After a moment, it starts rolling back.

However, if I deploy the stack with create-stack and --disable-rollback, it will stop in CREATE_FAILED state and not roll back.

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name my-application  \ 
--template-body file://template.yaml --disable-rollback --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

The CDK code

/// !cdk-integ pragma:ignore-assets
import * as cdk from '@aws-cdk/core';
import * as patterns from '../lib';
import * as ecs from '@aws-cdk/aws-ecs';
import * as ec2 from '@aws-cdk/aws-ec2'

class Demo extends cdk.Construct {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string) {
    super(scope, id);
    const vpc = new ec2.Vpc(this, 'Vpc', { maxAzs: 3, natGateways: 0 })
    const cluster = new ecs.Cluster(this, 'Cluster', {
      vpc,
      enableFargateCapacityProviders: true,
    });
    const task = new ecs.FargateTaskDefinition(this, 'Task', {
      // faulty configuration here
      cpu: 2560,
      memoryLimitMiB: 512, 
    });
    task.addContainer('nyancat', {
      image: ecs.ContainerImage.fromRegistry('public.ecr.aws/pahudnet/nyancat-docker-image:latest'),
      portMappings: [{containerPort: 80}],
      
    })
    new patterns.ApplicationLoadBalancedFargateService(this, 'Service', {
      cluster,
      circuitBreaker: { rollback: true },
      taskDefinition: task,
      taskSubnets: {
        subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC,
      },
    })
  }
}

const app = new cdk.App();

const env = {
  region: process.env.CDK_DEFAULT_REGION,
  account: process.env.CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT,
};

const stack = new cdk.Stack(app, 'no-rollback-demo', { env })

new Demo(stack, 'Demo')

app.synth();

What did you expect to happen?

What actually happened?

Environment

• ** AWS CLI Version 😗* aws-cli/2.2.34 Python/3.8.8 Darwin/20.5.0 exe/x86_64 prompt/off
• CDK CLI Version :
• Framework Version:
• Node.js Version:
• OS :
• Language (Version):

Other

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This is 🐛 Bug Report

[mjaswanthi]

Thanks Pahud. We are looking into this and will have an update shortly.

[pahud]

copy @rix0rrr