How can I force delete my AWS cloud formation stack? The tied resources were already deleted previously like the DNS, route53, etc. Whenever I delete the stack, it failed because it couldn't find the resources.
The specified hosted zone does not exist. DELETE_FAILED.
This made the deletion halt and made the stack still active. How can I force clean-up and remove this stack?
Based on this thread, it appears that stack deletion can be problematic if the stack is altered.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=71050&start=0&tstart=0
Looks like you need to go via Support to get it deleted.
That said, I have been able to delete stacks where I have manually altered the components. Sometimes you need to wait a couple of hours after you terminate instances, VPCs, subnets etc before the stack deletion actually succeeds.
It seems the Route53 records were either deleted manually before cloudformation or there was some failure within cloudformation after it deleted the record. Its stuck because it can't find the hosted zone because it was already deleted if indeed this is what was described in your post. You can try to update the stack with the original script and then delete the stack via cloudformation without any manual intervention.
