AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit)— 101

This post provides you a quick overview for AWS Cloud Development Kit, also known as CDK

Lal Verma
4 min readAug 17, 2023
AWS CDK

What is AWS CDK?

The AWS CDK lets you build reliable, scalable, cost-effective applications in the cloud with the considerable expressive power of a programming language.

This is how AWS puts the definition for AWS CDK. The key here is the “programming language”

Building applications on Cloud primarily refers to IaC here, which stands for “Infrastructure as a code”. AWS already provides AWS CloudFormation, as one of the fundamental “infrastructure as a code” framework, to provision AWS resources.

CloudFormation and other similar IaC tools, based on configuration file, have some shortcomings though. You need to learn a new syntax and rules. Also its difficult to apply advanced logic like conditions, loops, etc. as the CodeFormation is based on configuration files.

CDK tries to address these challenges. It provides the framework, where you can use your own “programming language”, like Python, Node, Java, etc., to automate your infrastructure provisioning.

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