Serverless remove with a precious dynamodb table

Serverless Framework
1

I noticed on a sls remove my dynamodb table with data inside gets nuked without warning.

~/tmp/sls-reduced$ serverless remove
Serverless: Getting all objects in S3 bucket...
Serverless: Removing objects in S3 bucket...
Serverless: Removing Stack...
Serverless: Checking Stack removal progress...
...........
Serverless: Stack removal finished...

https://s.natalian.org/2017-01-16/serverless.yml

So now I am worried that someone who I work with might tear down the table with production values accidentally and cause a LOT of headaches.

So does anyone have any experience or advice for me to make sure this isn’t a problem?

AWS Data Pipeline? Always have a backup in S3?
Don’t mention DynamoDB tables in Resources?

Thanks in advance,

1 Like
2

@hendry you can set a deletion policy when you create the table

MyTable:
  Type: AWS::DynamoDB::Table
  DeletionPolicy: Retain
  Properties:
    ...

This will prevent it from being deleted when you remove your serverles project. Note, that if you do this and want to re-create a dev environment you’ll have delete the table manually after removal.

3 Likes
3

Oh, will it fail to create if it sees an existing table with the name it wants?

4

That’s right @hendry. But it stops you deleting production data so it’s a win :).

If you don’t like that, you could use Serverless Variables to only set it to Retain on production using Reference Variables in Javascript Files.

5

The other option is to manage your DDB Tables in a separate stack to your Serverless service (This sounds like what you want).

You could even use Serverless for this separate stack - just create a serverless.yml without any function definitions, and just use the resources section to define your DDB table (all thanks to a PR from @johncmckim).