constructs VS projen

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.

I agree with constructs, I recommend using both (article mentions). Create your template, you might have various CDK constructs (community, AWS, personal), the template will produce a full project how you / your org want it. This might include your github actions for linting, cdk synth, testing, deployment etc. Application source (Lambda, API, container etc). Anyone in your team or external should be able to take that template and produce a project that is the same.

Have you heard of or explored https://github.com/aws/constructs (related: https://github.com/aws/jsii and https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk)?

This is what CDK uses for declarative modeling, but gives the opportunity to use languages/tooling that most devs are already familiar with. CDK8s already uses it as a replacement for yaml (technically, the yaml becomes an implementation detail rather than actually replaced)

All CDKs are based on Amazon's Constructs, (which also uses projen). They come with a CLI and Development Kit (API). In short, you set up an Object in code and then synthesize the representation to disk. This opens up the full power of programming languages. If you are sick of the issues with terraform, CloudFormation Templates, troposphere, Azure Blue Prints, or the like then this is for you.

This project uses AWS CDK as infrastructure as code solution. To maintain project configuration files efficiently, the project structure is generated using projen:

I recommend visiting the github page for projen and flicking through the documentation as I won't do it justice. Projen aims to:

cdk-django uses projen for maintaining the changelog and bumping versions and publishing to npm. It is popular among developers in the CDK community and is a really awesome tool since it basically uses one file (.projenrc.ts) to configure your entire repo, including files like tsconfig.json, package.json, and even GitHub Action workflows. It has a lot of configuration options, but I'm using it in a pretty simple way. It generates a new release and items to the changelog when I manually trigger a GitHub Action.

I will give you step-by-step instructions to create your very first AWS Organization with the AWS CDK and the help of projen and cdk-organizations. You only need already an AWS Account created which is not a member or management account of another AWS Organization.

If you go down that route you should use Projen to maintain the dependencies.

An Open Source CDK Community project which I find super interesting. It is doing cherry-picking from AWS Amplify UI and AWS CDK for deployment. I do that in my private projects as well for example https://github.com/senjuns/senjuns. I think the author could enhance/simplify its repo even more by using https://github.com/projen/projen for the project setup.

That said - https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker and https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket are interesting, and while AWS CDK is very AWS specific, the underlying jsii https://github.com/aws/jsii and projen https://github.com/projen/projen/issues are fundamental services.

The documentation for the classes of the bundled project types is at https://github.com/projen/projen/. In this documentation, you can see that the property github includes a mergify entry, which will define if the Mergify configuration is used. The default if the github entry is not specified, is that it will be included. So in our test, we can check that this configuration is not in place, after creating a project with the mandatory parameters.