CDK L2 constructs default stateful resources to RETAIN, leaving orphans after cdk destroy
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:08.624Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:08.624Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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Constructs that hold data default to a retaining removal policy rather than destroying. An s3.Bucket and a logs.LogGroup are retained on stack deletion, and an rds.DatabaseInstance defaults to taking a final snapshot. This protects production and quietly costs money everywhere else.
Two consequences follow. Storage keeps billing after the stack is gone and is no longer tracked by any stack, so it never appears in a teardown script. And redeploying an ephemeral environment fails with an already-exists error, because the retained resource still holds the physical name.
For preview and test environments set removalPolicy to DESTROY explicitly. For buckets add autoDeleteObjects true, which is required because CloudFormation cannot delete a non-empty bucket; that flag provisions a custom-resource Lambda to empty it first and the CDK rejects it unless the removal policy is DESTROY. Never set either on a production data store, and gate them on an environment flag rather than a comment.
Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/resources.html
aws-cdkawsinfrastructure-as-code
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