Allow resources with the same name to be conditionally accepted if they already exist

[rupe120]

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Tell us about your request

What do you want us to build?

A flag on the base resource definition that indicates a desire to not fail if creating a resource that already exists with the same name. Instead, treat it as an update for the properties defined in the template or even just assume everything exists as-is in the template.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?

What outcome are you trying to achieve, ultimately, and why is it hard/impossible to do right now? What is the impact of not having this problem solved? The more details you can provide, the better we will be able to understand and solve the problem.

When developing templates, sometimes they need to be deleted and recreated. For resources that are not generally deleted, like Backup Vaults and ECR it wastes a lot of time re-running the creation after remembering that some things need to be manually deleted.

Are you currently working around this issue?

How are you currently solving this problem?

If I am lucky I remember to delete the resources before trying to re-create the stacks. Otherwise I see the errors after the stacks fail to create.

What is the expect behavior with this new feature

Please include some code examples showing how this feature can be used.

Additional context

Anything else we should know?

Attachments

If you think you might have additional information that you would like to include via an attachment, please do - we will take a look. (Remember to remove any personally-identifiable information.)

[muneebar]

@rupe120 Thanks for your contribution! We'll triage and take a look at it. Stay tuned for updates!