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I'm always surprised that more people arent aware of CDK. Its an extremely powerful way to write software. Especially once you get good at it. CFN pales in comp

I'm always surprised that more people arent aware of CDK. Its an extremely powerful way to write software. Especially once you get good at it. CFN pales in comparison, CDK to me feels like the future of software development.

kevinsundar 5y ago
My comments are my own and don't represent my employer. Almost every new service built inside Amazon uses CDK. I too am surprised that more people aren't aware of it. And you're right once you get good at it you can spin up infrastructure incredibly quickly with minimal guess work.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  CDK was not used extensively at my org a couple of months ago. I agree it’s light years ahead of everything else though.
  - kevinsundar 5y ago
    Oh that's interesting, in my experience across the Books Org and InfoSec its being widely used.
jamesfinlayson 5y ago
Maybe CloudFormation is too entrenched at the moment? I think CDK became publicly available in late 2019 or early 2020. I haven't used it because I'm currently working on a project using Serverless (thin layer on top of CloudFormation) with no easy way to slip any CDK in.
takeda 5y ago
I was at a point willing to try it and what dissuade me was just that I also needed to have nodejs added as a dependency to my project.
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  Yea the nodejs dependency is an abomination. The cdk also requires a nodejs version newer than what comes on many linux distributions so you end up installing a custom nodejs version just to run cdk. I don’t know why they picked nodejs over a more sensible language such as python3 which comes installed almost anywhere or golang which is easy to distribute in binary form and relatively reverse compatible. The aws cli really got it right: just let me install a standalone binary and call it a day.
  - kennu 5y ago
    AWS CDK also works with Python. However, in my experience, TypeScript-based CDK projects are more productive to develop, due to all the built-in error checking and autocompletion features in Visual Studio Code. Node.js also provides a more coherent environment with the package.json structure, which defines all the scripts and dependencies etc. Python-based CDK projects seem to include more "custom hacks". Because of all this, I prefer to use TypeScript for CDK even if the actual application to deploy is based on Python.
    - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
      Regardless of what language you use to write your cdk stacks, the cdk cli application which transpiles your cdk stacks into cloudformation requires nodejs. So in reality cdk requires nodejs — always — and then whatever language you are writing the stacks in as well. It becomes a pain in the ass when you have a python application which is defined in a python cdk stack, but you still need nodejs to transpile your python cdk stack into cloudformation. My main gripe is that the cdk cli should be distributed as a standalone binary so I don’t need to install nodejs to deploy my project.
      - kennu 5y ago
        Ok thanks for clarifying. I guess we already have Node.js everywhere where CDK is used, so never noticed it. I can see it's uncomfortable when that is not the case.

kevinsundar 5y ago

My comments are my own and don't represent my employer. Almost every new service built inside Amazon uses CDK. I too am surprised that more people aren't aware of it. And you're right once you get good at it you can spin up infrastructure incredibly quickly with minimal guess work.

shepherdjerred 5y ago
CDK was not used extensively at my org a couple of months ago. I agree it’s light years ahead of everything else though.
- kevinsundar 5y ago
  Oh that's interesting, in my experience across the Books Org and InfoSec its being widely used.

jamesfinlayson 5y ago

Maybe CloudFormation is too entrenched at the moment? I think CDK became publicly available in late 2019 or early 2020. I haven't used it because I'm currently working on a project using Serverless (thin layer on top of CloudFormation) with no easy way to slip any CDK in.

takeda 5y ago

I was at a point willing to try it and what dissuade me was just that I also needed to have nodejs added as a dependency to my project.

__turbobrew__ 5y ago
Yea the nodejs dependency is an abomination. The cdk also requires a nodejs version newer than what comes on many linux distributions so you end up installing a custom nodejs version just to run cdk. I don’t know why they picked nodejs over a more sensible language such as python3 which comes installed almost anywhere or golang which is easy to distribute in binary form and relatively reverse compatible. The aws cli really got it right: just let me install a standalone binary and call it a day.
- kennu 5y ago
  AWS CDK also works with Python. However, in my experience, TypeScript-based CDK projects are more productive to develop, due to all the built-in error checking and autocompletion features in Visual Studio Code. Node.js also provides a more coherent environment with the package.json structure, which defines all the scripts and dependencies etc. Python-based CDK projects seem to include more "custom hacks". Because of all this, I prefer to use TypeScript for CDK even if the actual application to deploy is based on Python.
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    Regardless of what language you use to write your cdk stacks, the cdk cli application which transpiles your cdk stacks into cloudformation requires nodejs. So in reality cdk requires nodejs — always — and then whatever language you are writing the stacks in as well. It becomes a pain in the ass when you have a python application which is defined in a python cdk stack, but you still need nodejs to transpile your python cdk stack into cloudformation. My main gripe is that the cdk cli should be distributed as a standalone binary so I don’t need to install nodejs to deploy my project.
    - kennu 5y ago
      Ok thanks for clarifying. I guess we already have Node.js everywhere where CDK is used, so never noticed it. I can see it's uncomfortable when that is not the case.