Previously I have used sam deploy with the flag --no-fail-on-empty-changeset to not throw an error if a stack is deployed with no changes.
This switch does not work on version 0.33 any more, giving an error:
Error: no such option: --no-fail-on-empty-changeset
I'm experiencing the same issue.
It looks like --no-fail-on-empty-changeset has been removed but --fail-on-empty-changeset is still there.
https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/blob/develop/samcli/commands/deploy/command.py#L119
I don't think the --fail-on-empty-changeset is going to help though, since I can't say --fail-on-empty-changeset=false (or similar). Unless I've missed something.
+1
experiencing the same issue, and --fail-on-empty-changeset is not helping (and that's the default behavior)
Usage: sam deploy [OPTIONS]
Try "sam deploy --help" for help.
Error: no such option: --no-fail-on-empty-changeset
However, this might not be a bug, because, in the documentation, this flag has disappeared, instead, you may invert: if you would like to fail to create stack on empty changeset you can use this option:

Thank you all for the report. This was a miss during our porting of deploy off of AWS CLI and other improvement work on the command. This was fixed in #1607, which should be rolled up into our next release. Updating labels
This was released yesterday with v0.34.0.
Closing
Most helpful comment
Thank you all for the report. This was a miss during our porting of deploy off of AWS CLI and other improvement work on the command. This was fixed in #1607, which should be rolled up into our next release. Updating labels