DeletionPolicy attribute in CloudFormation

In AWS CloudFormation, all resource types have a DeletionPolicy attribute with possible values of Delete, Retain and Snapshot. Setting it to Retain would save the resource from being deleted by mistake.

If no deletion policy is specified for a resource, the default value is Delete. It means the resource will be removed as part of the CloudFormation stack removal.

For resources with a Retain deletion policy, when the stack is deleted, AWS CloudFormation leaves the resource without deleting it.

However, it does NOT stop the resource from being deleted directly:

• Programmatically, i.e. using AWS CLI tool.
• Manually, i.e. using the AWS web console.

With the DeletionPolicy attribute you can preserve or (in some cases) backup a resource when its stack is deleted. Resources that support Snapshot deletion policy include:

• AWS::EC2::Volume
• AWS::ElastiCache::CacheCluster
• AWS::ElastiCache::ReplicationGroup
• AWS::Neptune::DBCluster
• AWS::RDS::DBCluster
• AWS::RDS::DBInstance
• AWS::Redshift::Cluster

More information about Deletion Policy can be found at AWS documentation.

A example showing how to specify DeletionPolicy

{
  "AWSTemplateFormatVersion" : "2010-09-09",
  "Resources" : {
    "myS3Bucket" : {
      "Type" : "AWS::S3::Bucket",
      "DeletionPolicy" : "Retain"
    }
  }
}