What factors do folk take into account when deciding to write 1 large CF template, or nest many smaller ones? The use case I have in mind is RDS based where I'll need to define RDS instances, VPC Security groups, parameter and option groups as well as execute some custom lambda resources.
My gut feel is that this should be split, perhaps by resource type, but I was wondering if there was generally accepted practice on this.
My current rule of thumb is to split resources by deployment units - what deploys together, goes together.
I want to have the smallest deployable stack, because it's fast to deploy or fail if there's an issue. I don't follow this rule religiously. For example, I often group Lambdas together (even unrelated ones, depends on the size of the project), as they update only if the code/config changed and I tend to push small updates where only one Lambda changed.
I also often have a stack of shared resources that are used (Fn::Import-ed) throughout the other stacks like a KMS key, a shared S3 Bucket, etc.
Note that I have a CD process set up for every stack, hence the rule.
My current setup requires deployment of a VPC (with endpoints), RDS & application (API gateway, Lambdas). I have broken them down as
So, in general, I pretty much follow what @Milan Cermak described. But in my case, these deployments are done when needed (not part of CD) so exported parameters are stored in parameter store of AWS Systems Manager.
