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Cloud Development Kit Guide Published for AWS Infrastructure-as-Code
A guide for working with the Cloud Development Kit for infrastructure-as-code projects on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) platform has been published on GitHub.
AWS recently graduated the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), an open source software development framework helping developers define cloud infrastructure as code using familiar programming languages, from preview to become generally available.
The cloud giant said using AWS CDK to define infrastructure via code helps developers to quickly code up their AWS infrastructure, configure it, and tie it together with application code, specifically helping them:
- Keep infrastructure and application code in the same repository
- Make infrastructure changes repeatable and predictable across different environments, AWS accounts, and AWS regions
- Replicate production in a staging environment to enable continuous testing
- Replicate production in a performance test environment that you use just for the time required to run a stress test
- Release infrastructure changes using the same tools as code changes, so that deployments include infrastructure updates
- Apply software development best practices to infrastructure management, such as code reviews, or deploying small changes frequently
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AWS CDK (source: AWS)
Close on the heels of CDK becoming generally available, a developer and reportedly former AWS engineer named Kevin S. Lin published the Open CDK Guide on GitHub.
The purpose of the guide was described thusly:
The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is a framework built on top of CloudFormation that makes it delightful for users to manage AWS Infrastructure as Code (IaC). When everything is going right, the CDK will make you feel like a devops wizard. That being said, the cloud is complicated, CloudFormation coverage of AWS is incomplete, and the CDK itself (and IaC in general) is still a young framework with little in the way of established best practices.
This guide is an opinionated set of tips and best practices for working with the CDK. It is meant to be a living document, updated on an ongoing basis by the community as the CDK and practices around it mature.
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Open CDK Guide (source: Open CDK Guide)
Lin, describing himself as an early adopter of the CDK, said the project was heavily inspired by the og-aws guide (The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services).
The guide includes tips and best practices for working with constructs, stacks, patterns, tools and libraries and more, with a graphical legend provided to indicate:
- A gotcha, limitation, or quirk
- Areas where correction or improvement are needed
- Hard-to-find feature
- Third-party library or service solutions
Similar resources referenced on the site include:
- awesome-cdk: collection of CDK resources by one of the devs that created it
- CDK All The Things: article written by Lin covering general impressions of CDK and features
The project has garnered 110 stars at the time of this writing.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.