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 ve

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.