CDK has landed, and the AWS community is hyped – it was all the rage at the last AWS re: Invent, and that’s why I’d like to talk about what CDK introduces to an IaC world.  CDK is a game changer for all things infrastructure as code for AWS resources, and in this post, I’m going to dive into why that is, what it introduces, and how you can get started and even migrate existing resources.

So we’re on the same page; what exactly is AWS CDK?  CDK, AKA AWS Cloud Development Kit, is the successor of AWS’ CloudFormation that has been used to date for automating and codifying AWS cloud resources.  Because of CloudFormation’s inherent limitations, this opened the door for the popular infrastructure as code tools we have all grown to love, such as Terraform and Pulumi that, while they are not AWS native, still often delivered better IaC results than CloudFormation (particularly with diverse stacks).