February 10, 2020
Below is a blog post from our VP of Intelligence, Gabriel Alix, as he discusses his experience using AWS’s Cloud Development Kit.
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AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) hit general availability in July of 2019, and it’s trying to dethrone Terraform. CDK is AWS’s response to the limitation and criticism levied against CloudFormation – namely, the quality of life features (like for-loops, if statements, organization into modules, etc.) and more advanced features (like object-oriented design and high-level abstractions). Ultimately, it is too early to know if CDK will sway people away from Terraform, but it’s a start.
The CDK toolkit takes Typescript, Python, or JavaScript code and transforms it into a CloudFormation (CFN) template which it then deploys. A developer (without ever knowing how to write a CFN template) could pop open VS Code, import CDK with its constructs and starts declaring what they want in minutes. This is a big deal and unlike Terraform and CFN, where you must learn a new language to use. Instead, CDK says, “Hey you know typescript – awesome! Now, deploy an entire infrastructure.”
For example, to create an EC2 the following typescript can be used:
Time will tell if CDK will be amazing but things are looking hopeful and I for one will be watching.
To learn more about our AWS expertise:
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