How can I overcome the CloudFormation 500-resource limit error with serverless-plugin-split-stacks?

To overcome the CloudFormation 500-resource limit error while using serverless-plugin-split-stacks, you can try the following approaches:

1. Configuring serverless-plugin-split-stacks more effectively:

• Review your serverless.yml configuration for the plugin. You may need to adjust the splitting behavior to move more resources into nested stacks.
• Consider using custom splitting options provided by the plugin to target specific resource types or logical IDs for splitting.
• Experiment with different splitting strategies offered by the plugin to find the most effective configuration for your specific case.

2. Best practices for managing large deployments:

• Break down your application into smaller, more manageable services. This microservices approach can help reduce the number of resources in a single stack.
• Use nested stacks to organize and manage related resources. This can help keep your main stack below the resource limit.
• Leverage cross-stack references to share information between stacks, allowing you to split your infrastructure across multiple stacks while maintaining necessary connections.
• Consider using AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) for serverless applications, as it provides additional tools for managing complex architectures.

3. Additional solutions to address the limitation:

• Explore other Serverless Framework plugins that focus on resource management and stack splitting.
• Consider using AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) as an alternative to CloudFormation, as it provides more flexibility in managing large infrastructures.
• Manually split your resources into multiple CloudFormation stacks if the automated solutions are not sufficient.
• Use the resource import feature of CloudFormation to move existing resources between stacks, which can help in redistributing resources to stay within limits.

If these approaches don't resolve the issue, you may need to fundamentally restructure your application architecture to reduce the number of resources in a single deployment. This could involve breaking your application into multiple independent services or using alternative deployment strategies that don't rely on a single large CloudFormation stack.

Remember to test your changes in a non-production environment before applying them to your main deployment pipeline. Also, ensure that your CI/CD process is updated to accommodate any changes in your deployment strategy.
Sources
Resource Stack Migration | AWS CFT | AWS re:Post
How can I move a serverless VPC endpoint to another CloudFormation stack? | AWS re:Post

Hello,

I’m working on deploying a Serverless Framework application that uses theserverless-plugin-split-stacksplugin to split resources into nested stacks to avoid hitting the CloudFormation 500-resource limit. However, during deployment, I’m encountering the following

error: The CloudFormation template is invalid: Template format error: Number of resources, 516, is greater than maximum allowed, 500

Solution Tried:

• I tried using the serverless-plugin-split-stacks plugin to automatically split resources into nested stacks. However, despite splitting, the root stack still contains 516 resources, exceeding the 500-resource limit.
• I also manually created nested stack files and referenced them in the root stack to manage the resource count, but I still encountered the same error. Additionally, I combined both approaches (manual nested stack definitions and the plugin) to reduce the root stack resource count, but the error persists.
• I contacted AWS Support for assistance, but since the Serverless Framework is a third-party tool, they couldn’t provide a solution. They also confirmed that the 500-resource limit is a hard limit that cannot be increased from AWS’s side.