Exploring Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

How to deploy a simple SQS Queue sample application using the AWS CDK client

In this tutorial we are going to cover the very basics of using Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit. AWS CDK is an open source infrastructure as code library which allows you to setup and define infrastructure using popular programming languages such as TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET and Java.

Before we start — It is worth mentioning that I am writing this series of tutorials primarily to help myself and others learn the AWS CDK so that we can quickly deploy and configure complex AWS infrastructure whilst studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam. Just be aware that I have not used the AWS CDK in a production environment or in anger, so feel free to follow along and learn these tools with me, but be sure to read carefully through the documentation or seek further advice if you intend to use this in a production environment.

Also, whilst I’m going to explore the example Java app in some detail here, you might want to follow the CDK Intro Workshop to take the sample project a bit further as the focus of this article is intended to introduce the CDK and explore the basics of what it does and how to run the sample application.

With that small disclaimer out of the way, why bother using the CDK at all?

Main Benefits of using Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit:

• You get to write infrastructure as code using a familiar programming language such as TypeScript, Python, Java, .NET, and Go.
• You can write full tests for your infrastructure and configuration before deployment. This reduces the likelihood of misconfigurations and hopefully downtime.
• You can configure and launch infrastructure without having to be an AWS expert. AWS CDK comes with sensible defaults for most Infrastructure components so you generally only need to tweak the standard configuration rather than spend ages configuring the defaults yourself or becoming an AWS Cloud Formation expert. This is great for developers who might not have used AWS much before.
• Automatic creation of roles and permissions. AWS CDK can create the necessary roles and least-permissions policies automatically based on the code you write when using Constructs from the library.