The mutations and side-effects only last until synthesis. You can imagine a CDK app as a pure function that runs a bunch of mutations on an App object and then

The mutations and side-effects only last until synthesis. You can imagine a CDK app as a pure function that runs a bunch of mutations on an App object and then serializes the state of that object in the end to static assets that can be deployed. The internals of it all are messy, but at a conceptual level, it's easy to think about. CDKTF is really promising, IMO. When I last looked, it was still pretty new, but it's maturing, I think. One downside compared to regular AWS CDK is that the higher level constructs from the official AWS CDK can't be used in CDKTF. There is an adapter that exists, but it's one more layer between you and knowing what's going on: https://github.com/hashicorp/cdktf-aws-cdk https://github.com/hashicorp/cdktf-aws-cdk