Naming AWS resources is against best practices, apparently

I worked on some AWS CDK stuff today and ran into a few problems of the same shape. Some resource could not be created because I already had a resource with that name in the stack.

After a bit of googling, I found a comment in the aws-cdk repo issues outlining what went wrong.

I had happily added a custom name to both a S3 bucket and a CloudFront OriginRequestPolicy – a simple copy&paste "this will do" error as I took the CDK template for a Remix app from here

The template absolutely works for one deployment of one stack. But with handling different environments, the static names for these resources do not work. As lined out in the issue:

Assigning physical names to resources has some disadvantages in AWS CloudFormation. Most importantly, any changes to deployed resources that require a resource replacement, such as changes to a resource's properties that are immutable after creation, will fail if a resource has a physical name assigned.

The best part: I can simply remove the custom name and the naming is done automagically. How nice is that?

Well, now I know.