The Current CDK Landscape and Outlook

So far in this book, we have learned how AWS CDK has revolutionized the world of infrastructure as code (IaC). It has enabled developers to express cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript. It has redefined how we think about IaC. Developers can now programmatically define and manage infrastructure in a more flexible, scalable, and automated manner. This has enabled new use cases and allowed organizations to adopt DevOps practices more quickly and efficiently.

CDK has also allowed for new and advanced ways of spinning up infrastructure, giving organizations the ability to provision and manage their cloud resources in a more efficient and streamlined manner. As we proceed through this chapter, we will delve into some of the specific patterns that CDK has enabled and discuss how they can be leveraged to simplify and optimize the process of managing cloud infrastructure.

CDK has not...

Advanced ways that CDK is leveraged

In the last chapter, we covered ISAA, our preferred ways of creating cloud applications that stand the test of time so well that we seldom need to conduct any infrastructure maintenance procedures. As CDK adoption is increasing, we are seeing interesting infrastructure patterns emerge. In this section, we will cover some of these new and interesting ways companies are using CDK to respond to infrastructure challenges that previously required heavy development work that made them out of reach for start-ups and other small tech businesses.

Creating multiple CDK stacks

For the sake of simplicity, we have so far been mainly working with a single CDK stack in each CDK app. As mentioned before, AWS CloudFormation has limit of 500 resources per stack. You might think this is a large number, but when you deal with serverless applications and deploy many Lambda functions and their dependencies such as roles and layers, you will hit this limit.

One...

CDK for other platforms

In Chapter 9, when we covered the advantages and disadvantages of ISAA, we promised that we would cover some CDK-like libraries out there that are on the path to promoting openness in the serverless field. Let’s first cover some CDK alternatives.

Pulumi

Pulumi (https://www.pulumi.com/) is the most complete CDK alternative we’ve seen. Its API is slightly different from CDK, but at the end of the day, it produces the same results on AWS. Like CDK, it’s an Apache-licensed open source project with a service, and its cost is based on the number of L2 or L3 components Pulumi manages for you. But it comes with a great advantage: as well as targeting AWS, it targets Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, and Kubernetes. We believe they might even add more cloud providers to the list in the future.

Which came first?

CDK was released in 2018, earlier than Pulumi. But Pulumi as a company was established a year earlier than CDK’s release...

Where to go from here

Using AWS CDK or other CDK alternatives effectively requires a deeper insight into architectural practices, AWS services, platforms such as Kubernetes, and the latest developments in the field. The coding examples and the architectural practices used in this book are just a starting point. There are teams hard at work building incredible things using the technology. Here are some starting points for you to expand your knowledge and remain up to date:

• We highly recommend you get at least one AWS certification, be it foundational, associate, or a higher level: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/

This will help you immensely with getting to know AWS’s services and cloud best practices.

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework is also an incredibly useful resource to learn about the fundamentals of a great cloud application: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected

There is a serverless-focused article here: https://aws...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered some of the more sophisticated usages of AWS CDK, looked at open source tooling, and briefly covered the potential of using CDK alternatives and other open source solutions to build highly resilient serverless applications.

This chapter concludes our book. It has been somewhat difficult to gather information about such a new and constantly changing technology. We hope this book has been helpful in your endeavor to build great cloud applications. We can’t wait to see how AWS CDK changes the way you run cloud solutions in your organization and would love to hear back from you with any feedback regarding the book, the projects you utilize CDK for, or just a general chat on the topics.

Thank you from the Westpoint team, happy coding, and goodbye.