News

AWS Adds .NET, Java Support in Cloud Development Kit

• By David Ramel
• 12/03/2019

Support for .NET and Java, two of the most popular development approaches, is now generally available in the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), according to an announcement last week by Amazon Web Services.

The open-source AWS CDK hit general availability last July, sporting an an infrastructure-as-code approach that could initially be used with TypeScript/JavaScript and Python. At the time, C# and Java were on tap, available in developer previews. The CDK helps AWS cloud developers model and provision cloud application resources via services such as AWS CloudFormation.

"With the AWS CDK, you can design, compose, and share your own custom resources that incorporate your unique requirements," AWS' Martin Beeby said in a post last week. "For example, you can use the AWS CDK to model a VPC, with its associated routing and security configurations. You could then wrap that code into a construct and then share it with the rest of your organization. In this way, you can start to build up libraries of these constructs that you can use to standardize the way your organization creates AWS resources."

AWS says defining infrastructure as code enables developers to:

• 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

"I like that by using the AWS CDK, you can build your application, including the infrastructure, in your favorite IDE, using the same programming language that you use for your application code," Beeby said. "As you code your AWS CDK model in either .NET or Java, you get productivity benefits like code completion and inline documentation, which make it faster to model your infrastructure."

Beeby further details how to work with the CDK to build a host of resources in the cloud.

"With the addition of Java and .NET, the AWS CDK now supports 5 programming languages in total, giving you more options in how you build your AWS resources," Beeby concluded. "Why not install the AWS CDK today and give it a try in whichever language is your favorite?"