[ldoughty]

Note that the CDK has "levels" of abstraction.

Level 1 is basically full parity to CloudFormation.

Level 2 has reasonable defaults, typically.

Level 3 has opinionated implementations.

At level 3, you can have a reasonable multi-az multi-subnet ECS cluster in 5 lines.. which is a good starting point to work from in many cases.

For those doing really nitty gritty stuff, you can still work at level 1, and make IaC in a familiar language better suited for programming logic than CF (or even ansible or terraform) are.

We've used raw CF for hundreds of thousands of deploys (VM stacks).. AWS SAM for thousands of our serverless infra deploys, and we've also used ansible and terraform for some of our overhead / management layers (managing IAM, mostly). we're really excited to move our raw CF templates into the CDK next year, our "conditions" and parameter blocks are getting annoyingly dense and difficult to follow.