With infrastructure as code, systems and services can be managed in a structured, reproducible fashion, offering huge benefits to many, if not most, organizations. But the majority of tools and frameworks introduce their own declarative languages or use extended variants of YAML or JSON, which can lead to a steep learning curve and limited capabilities.

AWS CDK is a framework for defining infrastructure in a programming language of choice, making it the most accessible option for maintaining AWS resources in processes centered around software developers.

We will have a look at the basic principles and check out real-world examples from six months of CDK usage in production to find an answer to the question if CDK can live up to it’s ambitions goals.