Updating the Deployment Package

By using the same set of steps, but selecting Update stack instead of Create stack, you can update your application while it is running. CloudFormation has state of the art live update capabilities for continuous deployment. There are a few things to keep in mind however.

The first is that renaming a resource will cause that resource to be deleted and recreated during the update. The relevant resource name is the logical id of the resource. The logical id of a resource changes when its user id changes, and it also changes if the position of the primary resource definition in the project changes. For maximum continuity of an application, settle on names and positions of your resource in the project, and stick with it. This calls for a bit of up-front planning. Of course, that being said, the continuity of some resources matters a lot more than others. If an IAM role changes name, it will not cause a great disruption to the operation of the application. If a Cognito User Pool is recreated, it will be empty of the previous contents. This will necessarily disrupt the operation of the application.