Online tests CloudFormation self-destruct trigger flawed

[omus]

The online tests use a CFN stack that is supposed to stay up for ~3 hours after any activity. Currently the detection of activity is flawed as it requires that a change occurs to the stack and not just an attempt to update the stack. This is problematic as it could result in the stack self-destructing while it's being used.

Specifically, an CFN update that results in no change does not reset the timer.

[omus]

I was thinking about this a little bit and I came up with a couple of options to try:

• Use CFN tags/parameters to always make a change to the stack to ensure the last updated entry gets updated
• Modify the deletion check lambda to check for activity using other services such as the last AWS Batch job executed

[iamed2]

If we use aws cloudformation deploy --no-fail-on-empty-changeset we might be able to get an update event even when no change occurs.