[kenerwin88]

Hmm, as a former AWS employee who has used both heavily, my experience has been the opposite.

Terraform’s AWS provider calls the APIs directly, whereas CDK generates Cloudformation, an abstraction on top of the AWS APIs. For me, using Terraform was significantly faster than applying the same stack via CDK.

Or do you mean you’re able to iterate faster writing CDK vs TF?

[picardo]

Thinking back on it, we always used Terraform with Pulumi, which creates its own abstraction layer for a CF stack. It's hard to pinpoint where the root cause of the slowness was.. but in principle having fewer abstractions allowed us to iterate faster, and fix the bugs more quickly.