aws-cdk VS jsii

environment: Specifies the environment variable that will be available to our Lambda function. In this case I wrote an environment for RDS Database. Anyway, later I will write about AWS CDK using Python for creating database clusters, etc.

Today, I will show you how to build Amazon Location Service, which allows you to build location-based applications within your AWS environment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. I will also show examples of the recently popular CDK Migrate and AWS CloudFormation IaC generator.

AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK): is an open-source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages.

I am not one to build programming languages on a whim. In fact, I've spent the last five years building the AWS CDK, which is a multi-language library that addresses some of the challenges I am talking about by allowing developers to define cloud infrastructure using their favorite programming language.

I recently started exploring SST as an alternative to my favorite full-stack set consisting of Projen, AWS CDK, and React. I have been thoroughly impressed with the experience so far. In this article, I will demonstrate how to create a Next.js App Router S3 Picture Uploader using SST.

AWS CDK

For KMS 🔑, Each key is ~$1/mo, and with CDK, keys are generated on a massive scale, if not centralized.

Here is a github repository containing the code and instructions on how to automate this whole setup using AWS CDK.

Now that you have a working smart contract event listener, we'll deploy the resources to AWS using AWS CDK, which is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool. AWS CDK allows you to configure, deploy, and manage AWS cloud resources using popular programming languages such as TypeScript.

✨ Synthesis time: 14.44s CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Building f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Built f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Publishing f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Building 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Built 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: start: Publishing 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Published 517f907ce2318aa1a929b43bc1a0247ed509c92576c23a0a8aadfe1677f2ebd7:current_account-current_region CdkScheduledReportingStack: success: Published f3a91fb0ff1605e49b4b00aa223098d7a9a5307e98027f77aecc36bc05a4c3e7:current_account-current_region This deployment will make potentially sensitive changes according to your current security approval level (--require-approval broadening). Please confirm you intend to make the following modifications: IAM Statement Changes ┌───┬────────────────────────────────────────┬────────┬───────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ Resource │ Effect │ Action │ Principal │ Condition │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction.Arn} │ Allow │ lambda:InvokeFunction │ Service:events.amazonaws.com │ "ArnLike": { │ │ │ │ │ │ │ "AWS:SourceArn": "${Rule.Arn}" │ │ │ │ │ │ │ } │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole.Arn} │ Allow │ sts:AssumeRole │ Service:lambda.amazonaws.com │ │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportTopic} │ Allow │ sns:Publish │ AWS:${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole} │ │ └───┴────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┴───────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┘ IAM Policy Changes ┌───┬────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ Resource │ Managed Policy ARN │ ├───┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ + │ ${SalesReportFunction/ServiceRole} │ arn:${AWS::Partition}:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole │ └───┴────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ (NOTE: There may be security-related changes not in this list. See https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/1299) Do you wish to deploy these changes (y/n)?

What about jsii? The technology behind AWS sdks: https://aws.github.io/jsii/

Is Stainless similar, different?

The libraries for other supported languages of CDK are built as wrappers for underlying JS or maybe TS code via https://github.com/aws/jsii

So all the core CDK code is written first in JS/TS and then stubs for the other languages are added

Unfortunately this is often done without consideration for how the other supported langs actually work, and artefacts of e.g. JS lack of support for kwargs leak through

This is why e.g. the typing in CDK Python is completely broken - pretty much uniformly the concrete types like "Resource" don't implement their corresponding interface like "IResource" (to a type checker)

(There are many other typing niggles like this but that's the most egregious and pervasive one)

At the end of the day, having to explicitly cast concrete types as their interface to satisfy type checker is a minor annoyance, albeit a stupid one that could have been avoided with more care in the core library.

I could live with that, but I encountered so many bugs and issues trying to use CDK on current project that it's now much clearer to me why every company I worked at previously was using Terraform.

Pretty sure some of those issues are ultimately CloudFormation ones. The cumbersome CF > CDK JS > CDK Python stack is great for obfuscating errors and making debugging hard or impossible though.

Pulumi do something similar, albeit with Go as the core language and Terraform underneath. From what I've seen with a little use they have a much more successful result though, Pulumi Python was not a complete mess, and deploys faster and more reliable with better error feedback. I guess they just took more care to get it right.

Every version of the CDK uses an interop layer and runs on top of the Typescript version

https://github.com/aws/jsii

And as far as TF supports services before CFT. Guess which is easier for an AWS employee to do - getting the CF service team to support a new service or just contribute to Terraform’s open source project?

I know of at least one service where the service team introduced the needed APIs and then an employee of AWS wrote the TF provider and contributed to the project before AWS’s own internal team added it to CFT.

Source: former AWS ProServe employee

To "meet developers where they are" is a beautiful tenet of AWS, and of the CDK, and inspired us to create awesome technology such as JSII and constructs.

Yeah both CDKTF and Pulumi piggyback on JSII, a class translator that supports the languages you've mentioned, which was used as a building base for CDK.

The reason we chose to start with compilation to JavaScript and not some other popular cloud language is because JavaScript is currently one of the most used ones, and in addition, we are using JSII to write our SDK in Typescript and then export it for consumption in other languages, such as Go, Python, Java and others.

The CDKTF CLI is implemented in TypeScript. Providers and resources are implemented in TypeScript as well. jsii is used to compile the providers and resources to the supported languages.