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by scarface_74 969 days ago
Your people may be “smart”. But they aren’t “experienced”.

Did they use the CDK or even SAM?

1 comments

I've experienced ansible for managing a fleet of multiple hundred on-prem servers and now I'm experiencing CDK for managing a large infrastructure.

Both suck real bad.

Infrastrucure is hard, thankless work. Complexity blows up whatever you do.

You literally can tell ChatGPT to create a CDK typescript app that deploys a lambda + API Gateway where the lambda works with Get request and a dynamodb table. The lambda should have permission to read and write to the Table and it will get you 95% there.

Edit: I just did it with ChatGPT 4 expecting it to just create the CDK app. It actually created inline Node sample code as part of the construct for the actual lambda to read from the database.

The last time I did that as a sample to show other developers I still had a little additional prompting to do

I've found that "permissions" are what bites most developers. It's always either IAM or security groups...
Using the ChatGPT prompt I said above, it did the permissions correctly

    table.grantReadWrite(lambda function)
Just as an experiment, I’ve thrown Lambda code I’ve written from scratch into ChatGPT and asked it what permissions it needed. It got it right.

ChatGPT is well trained on everything AWS related. It can transform CloudFormation to idiomatically correct CDK or Terraform.

I hate to say this because it sounds like an appeal to authority. But I really want to set context. I used ChatGPT for projects while I was working at AWS ProServe and since I left. They were generic utility scripts with no proprietary business related code.

Neat! I personally hate writing Terraform (Does anyone like it?)