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Yes. Directly – no CDK or wrappers – using the serverless transform when it makes sense. I know how CloudFormation behaves, and none of the wrappers have convi

by jdub 3y ago

Yes. Directly – no CDK or wrappers – using the serverless transform when it makes sense. I know how CloudFormation behaves, and none of the wrappers have convinced me that translating through CloudFormation makes sense. ("through" because if you're using CDK, you're translating from imperative to declarative to imperative... why?!)

slau 3y ago
I write CloudFormation for a living. I had been quick to disregard CDK, and sort of ignored it for a while. I tried it on a recent greenfield project, and now I’m kicking myself for not giving it a try in earnest earlier.
- moritonal 3y ago
  It's in my opinion one of the more interesting tech in the IaC space. Even the way it works internally with the JS interpreter is kind of smart.
  - lf-non 3y ago
    Yes, purely from a user pov, the way fake stack traces are reported to point out the failing construct is quite nice.
  - loevborg 3y ago
    What do you mean by "JS interpreter"? Can you elaborate?
    - anentropic 3y ago
      The libraries for other supported languages of CDK are built as wrappers for underlying JS or maybe TS code via https://github.com/aws/jsii https://github.com/aws/jsii So all the core CDK code is written first in JS/TS and then stubs for the other languages are added Unfortunately this is often done without consideration for how the other supported langs actually work, and artefacts of e.g. JS lack of support for kwargs leak through This is why e.g. the typing in CDK Python is completely broken - pretty much uniformly the concrete types like "Resource" don't implement their corresponding interface like "IResource" (to a type checker) (There are many other typing niggles like this but that's the most egregious and pervasive one) At the end of the day, having to explicitly cast concrete types as their interface to satisfy type checker is a minor annoyance, albeit a stupid one that could have been avoided with more care in the core library. I could live with that, but I encountered so many bugs and issues trying to use CDK on current project that it's now much clearer to me why every company I worked at previously was using Terraform. Pretty sure some of those issues are ultimately CloudFormation ones. The cumbersome CF > CDK JS > CDK Python stack is great for obfuscating errors and making debugging hard or impossible though. Pulumi do something similar, albeit with Go as the core language and Terraform underneath. From what I've seen with a little use they have a much more successful result though, Pulumi Python was not a complete mess, and deploys faster and more reliable with better error feedback. I guess they just took more care to get it right.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Try Pulumi and have the same experience (but now vs CDK) all over again?
  - slau 3y ago
    Pulumi is not on some of my clients’ approved software list, so no can do.
lf-non 3y ago
Plain CF sucks because it doesn't really provide any kind of abstraction capability. So in any kind of real world application the yaml gets humongous that is very hard to review. I would have been perfectly happy to use CF if they added the notion of higher level constructs at CF level, but for whatever reason they haven't. So I use CDK because it provides the ability to reuse service compositions from third party libraries as well as across different internal projects. CDK is imperative but imperatively building the configuration is not at all the same as imperatively managing the infrastructure. Even if with CDK the configuration is imperatively built you retain all the benefits of having declarative infra - version control, selective auto update, rollback to previous state etc. Yes, while CF is clunky and slow, and I am sure everyone who uses it has at times gotten stuck with rollback failures, but CDK does provide a somewhat better dx on top of it.

by jdub 3y ago

slau 3y ago

I write CloudFormation for a living. I had been quick to disregard CDK, and sort of ignored it for a while. I tried it on a recent greenfield project, and now I’m kicking myself for not giving it a try in earnest earlier.

moritonal 3y ago
It's in my opinion one of the more interesting tech in the IaC space. Even the way it works internally with the JS interpreter is kind of smart.
- lf-non 3y ago
  Yes, purely from a user pov, the way fake stack traces are reported to point out the failing construct is quite nice.
- loevborg 3y ago
  What do you mean by "JS interpreter"? Can you elaborate?
  - anentropic 3y ago
    The libraries for other supported languages of CDK are built as wrappers for underlying JS or maybe TS code via https://github.com/aws/jsii https://github.com/aws/jsii So all the core CDK code is written first in JS/TS and then stubs for the other languages are added Unfortunately this is often done without consideration for how the other supported langs actually work, and artefacts of e.g. JS lack of support for kwargs leak through This is why e.g. the typing in CDK Python is completely broken - pretty much uniformly the concrete types like "Resource" don't implement their corresponding interface like "IResource" (to a type checker) (There are many other typing niggles like this but that's the most egregious and pervasive one) At the end of the day, having to explicitly cast concrete types as their interface to satisfy type checker is a minor annoyance, albeit a stupid one that could have been avoided with more care in the core library. I could live with that, but I encountered so many bugs and issues trying to use CDK on current project that it's now much clearer to me why every company I worked at previously was using Terraform. Pretty sure some of those issues are ultimately CloudFormation ones. The cumbersome CF > CDK JS > CDK Python stack is great for obfuscating errors and making debugging hard or impossible though. Pulumi do something similar, albeit with Go as the core language and Terraform underneath. From what I've seen with a little use they have a much more successful result though, Pulumi Python was not a complete mess, and deploys faster and more reliable with better error feedback. I guess they just took more care to get it right.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Aeolun 3y ago
Try Pulumi and have the same experience (but now vs CDK) all over again?
- slau 3y ago
  Pulumi is not on some of my clients’ approved software list, so no can do.

lf-non 3y ago

Plain CF sucks because it doesn't really provide any kind of abstraction capability. So in any kind of real world application the yaml gets humongous that is very hard to review. I would have been perfectly happy to use CF if they added the notion of higher level constructs at CF level, but for whatever reason they haven't. So I use CDK because it provides the ability to reuse service compositions from third party libraries as well as across different internal projects. CDK is imperative but imperatively building the configuration is not at all the same as imperatively managing the infrastructure. Even if with CDK the configuration is imperatively built you retain all the benefits of having declarative infra - version control, selective auto update, rollback to previous state etc. Yes, while CF is clunky and slow, and I am sure everyone who uses it has at times gotten stuck with rollback failures, but CDK does provide a somewhat better dx on top of it.