[ljm]

I knew someone a while back who worshipped the ground AWS stepped on, and thought CloudFormation and CDK was the best thing since sliced bread.

I honestly couldn’t see where they were coming from. CF is awful to work with, even more awful when you have to recover from a failed deploy or rollback, and hacking declarative concepts into Typescript for CDK is just a maintenance disaster in the waiting.

I don’t know why you would choose any of those over Terraform or equivalent declarative IaC tools unless you are a die hard AWS fanatic or simply had the misfortune of inheriting the stack.

[woeirua]

CDK lets you write Python instead of configuration files. It’s a good idea, but hobbled by CF being a steaming pile of garbage underneath it. TF was building a CDK competitor a while back but progress was slow on it.

[ljm]

I noticed TF has JS examples in the docs now. I haven’t looked but if it has the same problem as CDK, where you have to shoehorn declarative concepts into an imperative language, you still end up having to write weird code to work around the fact that you don’t actually know the value of resources until they’ve been created or modified.

Now if there was a prolog version? I’ll have some of that.

[Nextgrid]

You still need to run a JS environment even if your own CDK code is in Python. At that point you may as well just use JS if you're going to have to put up with its drawbacks anyway.