CLI: Ability to set stack creation timeout

Describe the feature

In pure Cloudformation, one can control the amount of time that can pass before the stack status becomes CREATE_FAILED by means of the –timeout-in-minutes CLI flag. This feature however, does not seem to be available in CDK.

Use Case

Just as in Cloudformation, it would be nice to be able to define stack creation timeouts when working with the CDK.

Proposed Solution

Add a property to the App class to allow one to define a stack creation timeout.

And/or

add a --timeout-in-minutes argument to the cdk deploy toolkit command.

Other Information

Despite not being able to find documentation to support this, it seems possible to set stack creation timeouts in Python by doing the following:

app = cdk.App()
app.timeout = 1

And by this i mean the interpreter doesn’t complain about this property and deployment can happen, however during stack creation itself the timeout is not honoured.

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CDK version used

2.37.1 (build f15dee0)

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Windows 10

[peterwoodworth]

This is a valid feature request, so I will leave it open 🙂 We can still track issues here that are blocked by CloudFormation

[houston3]

If possible, could you also add timeout and retry configuration to updates, not just creation? One of the most frustrating things about CDK and Cloudformation is waiting for a failed operation to complete and rollback.