ecs-refarch-cloudformation VS jsii

I first started out with IaC following this project aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation (which is pretty old at this point) and wrote a lot of CloudFormation by hand. The pain of doing that lead me to explore the CDK with Python. I learned TypeScript by rewriting the Python CDK code I wrote in TypeScript. I later worked with a team that was more experienced in Terraform and learned how to use that. I feel like Pulumi takes the best of the two tools and has a really great developer experience. There is a little bit of a learning curve with Pulumi, and you give up some of the simplicity of Terraform.

Yes, deploy them as nested stacks inside a parent template. You can reference outputs via !GetAtt NestedStackX.Outputs.OutputName. see this repo for an example https://github.com/aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation

Sure. My IaC journey actually started out with CloudFormation, and I learned a lot from this reference project: aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation. Then I picked up CDK when that became available and migrated a project from CloudFormation to CDK. It sounded like a nicer way to handle stacks in a familiar language with lots great one-liners and utility functions and constructs, and it definitely is. I have a similar project written in CDK that is an application/framework-first (Django) approach to learning and doing IaC that you can find here: https://github.com/briancaffey/django-cdk. This implements both ECS and EKS, but my attempts at learning EKS sort of fizzled out for now as I don't have the need to use it, and for the task at hand (running a monolithic Django application on AWS) I think ECS makes a LOT more sense.

I'm mostly using just EC2 instances running Docker Engine and Docker Compose (with configs and Compose projects in Git), but I'm starting to use CloudFormation and ECS more. I've taken a lot of inspiration from https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-refarch-shibboleth, https://github.com/awslabs/ecs-refarch-continuous-deployment, and https://github.com/aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation. At some point in the future, I plan to refactor my CloudFormation/ECS deployments into something more cloud agnostic using Terraform/Kubernetes.

If you need more options that is provided the Docker/ECS tool listed above you can roll your own using CloudFormation (the AWS deployment scripting tool). There's a good starter here.

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.