I worked closely with the folks that wrote our platform's IaC, first in CDK, then in Terraform. I wrote a bit of CDK and zero TF myself, but here are some of th

I worked closely with the folks that wrote our platform's IaC, first in CDK, then in Terraform. I wrote a bit of CDK and zero TF myself, but here are some of the reasons we switched: A big plus is that Terraform works outside of AWS land. CDK is a nightmare to work with. You're writing with programming-language syntax, which tempts you to write dynamic stuff - but everything still compiles down to declarative CFN, which just makes the ergonomics feel limited. The L2 and L3 constructs have a lot of implicit defaults that came back to bite us later. With CDK you get synth and deploy, which felt like a black box. Minor changes would do the same 8 minute long deploy process as large infrastructure refactors. Switching to TF significantly sped up our builds for minor commits. There might be a better way to do this with CDK (maybe deploying separate apps for each part of our infrastructure) and we may have just missed it.