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Recap and cleanup

In this chapter

  • A recap of what you built across the workshop.
  • How to tear down every resource you created so nothing keeps billing.

What you built

Across the workshop you took a stock cdk init app and, with no wrapper code in bin/:

  • Turned it into one flat CodePipeline from a single cicd.config.ts — Source → Build → UpdatePipeline → deploy per stage — and learned every defineCICD field.
  • Modeled a promotion path as data — stages, fail-closed approval gates, multi-region fan-out, and forced deployment roles.
  • Chose a deploy model and tuned the pipeline — assembly promotion vs deploy-time synth, async deploy, and disposable provisioning.
  • Authenticated builds to a private CodeArtifact registry with one config block.
  • Ran container mode — Repo 1 builds a config-agnostic image; Repo 2's defineDeployment deploys it to many targets with cdk-cicd deploy --from-image.
  • Saw how to migrate from Blueprint without recreating deployed stacks.

The through-line: fewer moving parts you own, and a pipeline you can read.

Cleanup

Only delete resources you created for this workshop

The steps below tear down the stacks this workshop created. Deleting shared or production stacks can cause outages or data loss. Confirm each stack name belongs to this workshop before deleting it, and work in your sandbox/dev account.

Delete in reverse order of creation so dependencies resolve cleanly.

1. Delete the application stacks

For each stage the pipeline deployed to (e.g. dev, prod), delete the application stacks in that stage's account and region — for example my-app-dev, my-app-prod if you used stageStackName:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name my-app-dev --region <region>

2. Delete the pipeline and support stacks

In the hub account, delete the pipeline stack and the support stacks the wrapper provisioned (encryption, compliance/log bucket, SSM parameters). Empty the artifact and log S3 buckets first if deletion is blocked by non-empty buckets.

Disposable pipelines self-clean

If you provisioned with npx cdk-cicd deploy-ci --disposable, teardown empties and deletes the pipeline's own resources (including a provisioned ECR repo in container mode) for you — use it for throwaway experiments.

3. Container mode — remove the deployer image

If you ran chapter 5, delete the pushed image and, if the pipeline provisioned it, the <application>-deployer ECR repository (a disposable pipeline does this automatically):

aws ecr delete-repository --repository-name my-app-deployer --force --region <region>

4. Leave the CDK bootstrap in place (usually)

The CDKToolkit bootstrap stack is shared across all CDK apps in an account/region. Leave it unless this was a throwaway sandbox you're fully decommissioning.

Verify

In each account/region you used, the CloudFormation console lists no remaining workshop stacks, and no CodePipeline, CodeBuild projects, or ECR repositories from this workshop remain. Any leftover S3 buckets from the pipeline are empty and deleted.

Recap

You've completed the Autopilot pipeline workshop and cleaned up after it. You can now take any ordinary CDK app, add one config file, and get a readable, config-driven pipeline — scaling out to container mode or migrating from Blueprint when you need to.