AEM AWS Stack Builder heavily utilises CloudFormation stacks to provide structure to the AWS resources defined within the supported AEM architectures.
The diagrams further below describe the relationship between the stacks, which differ between architectures and permission types. Please take note of the following keys:
- Light yellow box represents a nested stack
- Light orange box represents a parent/root stack
- Arrow represents association between the two stacks, indicating that the stack on the left exports some values which are consumed by the stack on the right
Each AEM architecture has a prerequisites stack and a main stack. The prerequisites stacks contain AWS resources that are slow(er) to provision. The main stacks contain AWS resources that are fast(er) to provision. This allows the flexibility for the user to keep the prerequisites stacks and only terminate/stop the main stacks in order to save cost but still be able to start the AEM environment in a timely manner.
The associations between these stacks depend on the AEM architecture:
- AEM Consolidated architecture allows one prerequisite stack to be associated to one or more main stacks
- AEM Full-Set architecture requires one prerequisites stack to be associated to one main stack
For a stack that contains AWS resources which the user doesn't have permission to provision, the stack would be referred to as an exports stack (*-exports). You should provision the AWS resources separate from AEM AWS Stack Builder, and then configure those resources to be referenced by the exports.
For example, instance-profiles stack contains AWS resources that will be provisioned when you're using permission type b. However, if you're using permission type c, it will use instance-profiles-exports stack instead, containing the ARNs/values of the AWS resources which are generated external to AEM AWS Stack Builder.
