askvity

What is CDK?

Published in Cloud Infrastructure 3 mins read

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework that lets you define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. Essentially, it allows you to use familiar programming languages to define your cloud resources, making infrastructure management more accessible and efficient.

Key Features of AWS CDK

Here's a breakdown of what makes CDK a valuable tool:

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): CDK enables you to define your infrastructure using code, which can be version-controlled, tested, and easily replicated.

  • Familiar Programming Languages: You can use languages like TypeScript, Python, Java, C#, and Go (in developer preview) to define your infrastructure. This allows developers to leverage their existing skills.

  • AWS CloudFormation Integration: CDK synthesizes your code into AWS CloudFormation templates, which are then used to provision your infrastructure. This ensures compatibility with AWS's infrastructure-as-code service.

  • Higher-Level Abstractions: CDK provides higher-level components called Constructs, which represent common infrastructure patterns. This simplifies the process of defining complex resources.

How CDK Works

The core principle behind CDK is defining infrastructure using code and deploying it using CloudFormation. Here's a simplified workflow:

  1. Define Infrastructure: You write code using a supported programming language to define your desired AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, S3 buckets, Lambda functions).
  2. Synthesize: The CDK toolkit takes your code and synthesizes it into a CloudFormation template, which is a JSON or YAML file describing the infrastructure.
  3. Deploy: The CloudFormation template is then deployed to AWS CloudFormation, which provisions and manages the defined resources.

Benefits of Using CDK

  • Increased Productivity: Define infrastructure faster and more efficiently using familiar programming languages and higher-level abstractions.

  • Improved Code Quality: Leverage software engineering best practices (e.g., version control, testing) for infrastructure management.

  • Reduced Complexity: Simplify complex infrastructure deployments with reusable components and patterns.

  • Consistency and Repeatability: Ensure consistent infrastructure configurations across different environments.

Example

Imagine you want to create an S3 bucket using CDK. Instead of writing a lengthy CloudFormation template, you could use a few lines of Python code:

from aws_cdk import core
from aws_cdk import aws_s3 as s3

class MyStack(core.Stack):

    def __init__(self, scope: core.Construct, construct_id: str, **kwargs) -> None:
        super().__init__(scope, construct_id, **kwargs)

        # The code that defines your stack goes here

        bucket = s3.Bucket(self, "MyFirstBucket",
            versioned=True
        )


app = core.App()
MyStack(app, "MyFirstCDKApp")

app.synth()

This simple example demonstrates how CDK allows you to define an S3 bucket with versioning enabled using just a few lines of code. The CDK toolkit would then generate the corresponding CloudFormation template for deployment.

Related Articles