Stack Architecture Recommendations

What this rule checks

Detects architectural omissions across the stack: missing CloudWatch Alarms on critical resources, Lambda functions without X-Ray tracing, public-facing resources without WAF, RDS databases without Secrets Manager rotation, and excessive NAT Gateway usage.

How to fix it

1. 1Add CloudWatch Alarms on key metrics (Lambda errors, ECS task failures, RDS connections)
2. 2Enable X-Ray tracing on Lambda functions for distributed-request visibility
3. 3Associate AWS WAF with public-facing API Gateway, ALB, or CloudFront distributions
4. 4Use Secrets Manager with automatic rotation for RDS database credentials
5. 5Audit NAT Gateway count and consider VPC endpoints or NAT instances for cost reduction

CDK Insights pinpoints the exact file and line in your CDK source for every finding, so you can jump straight to the fix.

Affected resource types

Intentional? Suppress this finding

Sometimes a flag is deliberate — a genuinely public endpoint, say. You can dismiss stack-architecture-recommendations and the reason is kept in the report, not silently hidden.

In .cdk-insights.json:

{
  "ignoreRules": [
    { "id": "stack-architecture-recommendations", "reason": "Why this is intentional" }
  ]
}

Or inline in your CDK code:

Validations.of(scope).acknowledge({
  id: 'cdk-insights::stack-architecture-recommendations',
  reason: 'Why this is intentional',
});

Use the rule ID stack-architecture-recommendations shown above — not the CDK-* ID from SARIF / GitHub code scanning. To dismiss every finding on one construct instead, use ignorePaths. Suppression docs →

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