Remote templates?

[pbrisbin]

Within a Stackctl-controlled directories, templates/ are how you share patterns between concrete stacks/. You might have templates/s3-bucket.yaml that encodes your organization's preferred way to create S3 Buckets, configure and secure them, then many stacks/... can use that same template, supply some Parameters, and receive all that institutional knowledge as it evolves, for free.

This of course requires templates/ to live alongside stacks/, which works fine with a single infra repository. But there is value in stacks/ living alongside the apps they support, being owned by other teams, in other repositories. This works great, but you risk duplicating templates/ when multiple such use-cases deploy similar resources.

So I'd like to explore the design space of loading Templates from a central location. Suggestions welcome.

[pbrisbin]

One option for side-stepping this is https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/share-reusable-infrastructure-code-aws-cloudformation-modules-and-stacksets/. Rather than, for example, having a shared s3-bucket.yaml that is used by multiple repositories, users would define a custom module for an S3 bucket resource that could be re-used in the normal way from separate templates. The upside is this is an AWS-blessed path that is likely to get smoother over time, and it would require no changes to Stackctl. The downside is it's a relatively heavy and complex thing for users to do. And there is no easy ramp for Stackctl users to start sharing the [resource definitions within the] templates they're already using.