AWS CDK - Cloud Development Kit

• Allows us to define our cloud infrastructure using a familiar programming language such as JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java and .NET
• The CDK framework contains high level components called constructs
• The code is transpiled into a CloudFormation template (JSON/YAML)
• With CDK we can deploy infrastructure and application runtime code together
  • This is great fro Lambda functions
  • Or great for Docker containers which can be deploy to ECS/EKS

CDK vs SAM

• SAM:
  • Serverless focused
  • We write our templates in JSON or YAML
  • Great for quickly getting started with Lambda
  • Leverages CloudFormation
• CDK:
  • Superset of CloudFormation, supports every AWS service
  • We write infra in a programming language we know (see above)
  • Leverages CloudFormation
• CDK + SAM:
  • We can use SAM CLI to locally test CDK apps
  • We must first run cdk synth - this will generate CFN template which we can invoke with SAM cli