Working with nested stacks - Amazon CloudFormation
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Working with nested stacks

Nested stacks are stacks created as part of other stacks. You create a nested stack within another stack by using the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resource.

As your infrastructure grows, common patterns can emerge in which you declare the same components in multiple templates. You can separate out these common components and create dedicated templates for them. Then use the resource in your template to reference other templates, creating nested stacks.

For example, assume that you have a load balancer configuration that you use for most of your stacks. Instead of copying and pasting the same configurations into your templates, you can create a dedicated template for the load balancer. Then, you just use the resource to reference that template from within other templates.

Nested stacks can themselves contain other nested stacks, resulting in a hierarchy of stacks, as in the diagram below. The root stack is the top-level stack to which all the nested stacks ultimately belong. In addition, each nested stack has an immediate parent stack. For the first level of nested stacks, the root stack is also the parent stack. in the diagram below, for example:

  • Stack A is the root stack for all the other, nested, stacks in the hierarchy.

  • For stack B, stack A is both the parent stack, and the root stack.

  • For stack D, stack C is the parent stack; while for stack C, stack B is the parent stack.


   Nested stacks, which are created as part of another stack, have an immediate parent stack, and the top-level
    root stack.

Certain stack operations, such as stack updates, should be initiated from the root stack rather than performed directly on nested stacks themselves. Also, in some cases, nested stacks affect how stack operations are performed. For more information, refer to the following topics:

To view the root stack of a nested stack
  1. Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon CloudFormation console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudformation/. Select the stack that you want.

    Nested stacks display NESTED next to their stack name.

  2. On the Overview tab, choose the stack name listed as Root stack.

To view the nested stacks that belong to a root stack
  1. Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon CloudFormation console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudformation/. Choose the name of the root stack whose nested stacks you want to view.

  2. Expand the Resources section.

    Look for resources of type AWS::CloudFormation::Stack.