[brodouevencode]

I have deep concerns regarding imperative programming w.r.t infrastructure as code. It's mostly developer-experience related: as a developer I just want to tell AWS/GCP/Azure to "give me three boxes behind a load balancer in two regions". I know it's currently popular to hate YAML (or HCL) but it works and at a glance I can get a feel of what my infrastructure should look like. Therefore IMHO declarative should be the preferred standard for infrastructure.

From an infrastructure management standpoint I completely agree with your take - do exactly this enough times and you get skew, compliance problems, pets instead of cattle. Hence you would want a CDK to facilitate those enterprise needs. Any sort of composability that doesn't break and has sane defaults would be ideal in a CDK. The problem I have with current CDKs is the amount of boilerplate to get this reproducibility, and then on top of that I have to write it in a non-declarative way.

I like where your head is at but I do not think AWSCDK extensions are the answer. I think cdktf and Pulumi are a little bit closer to the right ("my right"!) answer but still have a ways to go.