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A workflow is the record of a CloudFormation stack run in your AWS account. Gapstack subscribes to every event from that stack and shows the same CloudFormation event history on Workflows. You do not have to open the AWS console to follow a deploy. The status, resource events, and failure reasons you see in Gapstack are the events CloudFormation emitted for the stack.
Gapstack does not replace CloudFormation. It streams environment stack events into the product so you can watch deploys next to the environments they belong to.

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The two CloudFormation stacks

Gapstack creates two kinds of CloudFormation stacks in your AWS account:
  1. Account connection stack — one stack per linked AWS account. It creates the IAM role Gapstack assumes. You create this stack when you connect an AWS account.
  2. Environment stack — one stack per environment. It provisions the resources in that environment, such as Lambda, APIs, and data stores.
Projects do not have a CloudFormation stack. A project only groups environments. The screenshot below is an environment stack update.

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What a workflow contains

Each workflow tracks one stack operation. As CloudFormation applies the template, Gapstack records each stack event on State Records. The table matches the CloudFormation event history:
  • Resource status
  • Detailed status
  • Reason
  • Type
  • Date
You can also compare the previous stack and the new stack, then click View Stack Diff. Open Workflows in the sidebar to see runs across the organization. You can also open a workflow from an environment.

Workflow details for an environment stack, including CloudFormation state records.

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Workflow status

If a workflow fails, start with the event that has a status reason. That text is the CloudFormation failure message for the resource. If this was the first deploy of the environment, see Failed first deploy.

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How it relates to AWS

When you deploy an environment, Gapstack assumes the IAM role from the account connection stack and creates or updates that environment’s CloudFormation stack. CloudFormation writes events as each resource is created, updated, or deleted. Gapstack is subscribed to those events and writes them onto the workflow. The same history is available in AWS on the stack Events tab. See View CloudFormation stack events.