Support Drift-Aware Change Sets

[alex-at-cascade]

Describe the feature

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/safely-handle-configuration-drift-with-cloudformation-drift-aware-change-sets/

Use Case

Should better handle situations where deployed infrastructure has drifted.

Proposed Solution

No response

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

AWS CDK Library version (aws-cdk-lib)

2.232.1

AWS CDK CLI version

2.1033.0

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

all

[pahud]

Hi @alex-at-cascade,

Thank you for this feature request! This appears to be a valuable addition to the CDK that would help teams better handle configuration drift scenarios.

CloudFormation's drift-aware change sets feature (announced in November 2025) provides a three-way comparison between the previous template, actual resource state, and proposed template. This would indeed be useful for CDK users who need to safely handle situations where infrastructure has drifted from the template definition.

The implementation would primarily be in the CDK CLI layer, as the underlying CloudFormation functionality already exists.

I am for now making it a p2 FR, we welcome 👍 to help us prioritize.