Jira Data Center on AWS: Issues Updating the Root Stack

[Richard Schaeffer]

I've been following this guide to make changes to our Jira Data Center instance hosted on AWS:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/upgrading-jira-data-center-on-aws-945105105.html

But I seem to get consistent issues with the quick start.  At first, none of my IAM users were able to successfully complete the CloudFormation; only when run under the root user did it succeed.  I'm using Jira Core 8.8.1 with postgresql 11.  

Now, I can't update the root stack - I get a host of errors related to export variables.  This is just one of the errors, they change depending on which parameters I'm modifying, but they are always of the form "Export ______ cannot be deleted as it is in use by JiraDataCenter."

For context, I was modifying the instance size (c5 -> c5.xl) and number of nodes (both decreasing to 0 and increasing to 2 or 3).  I have tried modifying pretty much every parameter and it will not succeed.  I've also tried changing the prefix from "ATL" to "JDC" or something.  

The workaround I found that is working for me to is to update the nested stacks individually - but obviously it's more work and can leave the stack in an inconsistent state.  If you update the nodes, but then don't update the VPC, it won't pick up the new nodes, etc and definitely doesn't deliver the seamless stack updates that it should be capable of.  

Overall, I'm left with the impression that I'm missing something important - this doesn't seem to be the way it should be working.  Am I missing something?  Are these known issues?  

Any help is greatly appreciated.  Thank you!