(cli): describeStackEvents queries ALL stack events when looking for new events

[frederik-alpha]

Describe the bug

After upgrading to 2.167.0, our deployments using GitHub Actions went from taking 10-11 minutes, to taking ~1 hour.

In reality, the deployments are taking roughly the same time, but the GitHub Actions runner is not receiving the answer.

I believe this is due to a change where all the stack events are loaded at once, before looping through them from newest to oldest and stopping when an event is met that has already been handled.

It should be said that I queried all stack events for one of our stacks and it has ~400,000 events.

Regression Issue

• Select this option if this issue appears to be a regression.

Last Known Working CDK Version

2.166.0

Expected Behavior

CLI getting feedback about stack deployment quickly.

Current Behavior

CLI not getting feedback about stack deployment until a long time after stack deployment has actually finished.

Reproduction Steps

The error only occurs when you have a stack with a large amount of stack events. I do not know how to reproduce that in a test.
The issue occurs for us when using cdk deploywith a stack that has ~400,000 stack events.

Possible Solution

aws-cdk/packages/aws-cdk/lib/api/util/cloudformation/stack-event-poller.ts

Line 91 in b8f47c8

const eventList = await this.cfn.describeStackEvents({

This method is calling describeStackEvents, and iterating through them, stopping when it reaches one that has already been handled, or one that is older than the poller itself.

aws-cdk/packages/aws-cdk/lib/api/aws-auth/sdk.ts

Line 667 in b8f47c8

describeStackEvents: async (input: DescribeStackEventsCommandInput): Promise<StackEvent[]> => {

The method describeStackEvents is iterating through all pages of the stack events, before returning all of them.

My suggestion is that the poller itself should be iterating through the pages of the stack events, similar to how it was in 2.166.0. Alternatively, the describeStackEvents should return an async iterable or something similar, but my TypeScript is not strong enough to know if that is possible :-)

Additional Information/Context

No response

CDK CLI Version

2.167.1 (build d681b12)

Framework Version

No response

Node.js Version

v22.9.0

OS

macOS 14.6

Language

Python

Language Version

Python 3.10

Other information

No response

[pahud]

Thank you for your report. We'll report it to the core team for further investigations.

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