16. What are the pros and cons of CDK?

https://youtu.be/jjyNTNQdW2s

In this episode, Eoin and Luciano explore the various pros and cons of AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

We start by describing what CDK is and what it is used for. Then we spend a bit of time covering the details of how CDK actually works defining L1, L2 and L3 constructs and the integration with CloudFormation.
In the central part of the episode we deep dive into a bunch of pros and cons of CDK, mostly trying to describe the tradeoffs and the pitfalls.
Finally, we close the episode by giving a piece of advice on what we believe is the best way to get started with CDK to minimize the surprises and be able to reap all the benefits of this amazing tools.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:27 What is CDK
01:12 How CDK works
03:30 Advantages of CDK
06:30 CDK Policy generation
08:00 CDK and CloudFormation changesets
10:25 CDK for pipelines
12:30 CDK assets
13:50 The cons of CDK
16:55 The CDK bootstrap phase
18:05 CDK lifecycle and programming caveats
19:45 CDK is not really a deterministic deployment path
20:10 CDK can create cultural barriers
22:55 How to get started safely with CDK
25:25 Outro

In this episode we mentioned the following resources:
- CDK: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/
- CloudFormation: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
- Terraform: https://www.terraform.io/
- CDK PIpelines: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/pipelines-readme.html
- CDK Patterns: https://cdkpatterns.com/
- Create Resources conditionally with CDK: https://loige.co/create-resources-conditionally-with-cdk

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