amazon web services - Incorporate existing AWS resources into a CloudFormation stack

Question

Is there a way to incorporate existing AWS resources that were created outside of CloudFormation into an existing CloudFormation stack? I'd like to do this without having to add a new resource in the CloudFormation stack and migrate the existing resource's data over to that new resource. I see that AWS now has drift detection for CloudFormation stacks. I'm wondering if that might be able to be leveraged to incorporate existing resources into a stack.

Answer 1

The ability to import/adopt resources into an existing CloudFormation stack is the #1 ask from CloudFormation customers. We've been thinking about ways to do it for a while, but haven't hit upon the mechanism that both fits customer needs and works at the scale the service operates.

Since we don't expose stack state info anywhere outside the service for you to modify, the only approach you can take until we offer an adoption feature is to either store metadata about the resources in a parameter store, or use a custom resource as a wrapper to retrieve the information about the underlying resource and then surface it to your stack via Fn::GetAtt.