Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases now! discount-offer-chevron-icon
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required.
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
AWS CDK in Practice

You're reading from   AWS CDK in Practice Unleash the power of ordinary coding and streamline complex cloud applications on AWS

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2023
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801812399
Length 196 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Tools
Arrow right icon
Authors (2):
Arrow left icon
Leo Lam Leo Lam
Author Profile Icon Leo Lam
Leo Lam
Mark Avdi Mark Avdi
Author Profile Icon Mark Avdi
Mark Avdi
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

Table of Contents (17) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Part 1: An Introduction to AWS CDK
2. Chapter 1: Getting Started with IaC and AWS CDK FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: A Starter Project and Core Concepts 4. Part 2: Practical Cloud Development with AWS CDK
5. Chapter 3: Building a Full Stack Application with CDK 6. Chapter 4: Complete Web Application Deployment with AWS CDK 7. Chapter 5: Continuous Delivery with CDK-Powered Apps 8. Chapter 6: Testing and Troubleshooting AWS CDK Applications 9. Part 3: Serverless Development with AWS CDK
10. Chapter 7: Serverless Application Development with AWS CDK 11. Chapter 8: Streamlined Serverless Development 12. Part 4: Advanced Architectural Concepts
13. Chapter 9: Indestructible Serverless Application Architecture (ISAA) 14. Chapter 10: The Current CDK Landscape and Outlook 15. Index 16. Other Books You May Enjoy

Getting Started with IaC and AWS CDK

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the standard practice of defining various infrastructure components using code. You must have heard about a few of these software tools, such as Chef, Puppet, Terraform, or the old-school Bash programming, to set up servers in a predictable way.

The need for IaC was born out of the toolset for spinning up servers circa 2006 lacking the predictability, speed, and agility of the code used in programs that were deployed onto servers. Pre IaC, the normal workflow of deploying something on AWS would be this:

  1. Spinning up Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers manually via the dashboard
  2. SSHing into the machines
  3. Copying some Bash configuration files using Secure Copy Protocol (SCP)
  4. Running them in a certain sequence to deploy an application
  5. Configuring database connections

This is one of the better scenarios of how things were done back then.

Needless to say, this method was not scalable, repeatable, or reliable enough to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of web applications on the cloud. Around the same time, tools such as Chef, Puppet, and a few others showed up, which helped immensely with server configuration.

A couple of years later, tools such as Terraform popped up, which at the time were quite revolutionary in the way that they defined the desired state of the deployment on a given cloud service provider (CSP) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a declarative fashion. This configuration would then be fed into the Terraform toolset, which would then decide which AWS services needed to be created, deleted, or modified. Let’s look at one such Terraform configuration file:

resource "aws_instance" "single-instance"{
  ami           = "ami-ebd02392"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  subnet_id     = "subnet-eddcdzz4"
  vpc_security_group_ids = ["sg-12345678"]
}

The preceding Terraform configuration file defines an AWS EC2 server using the aws_instance resource type provided by Terraform’s AWS provider and then is given an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) configuration (which is essentially the operating system image) instance type to define its CPU and RAM configuration and other network settings. If you have Terraform set up correctly locally, this will investigate your AWS setup, see that this server doesn’t exist, and then proceed to create this server for you.

Obviously, this is a very simple example. There are Terraform configuration projects with many thousand lines of configuration files. These projects can get quite elaborate and out of hand once the complexity of the deployment increases. There are various remedies for this, none of which—in our opinion—really addresses the issue here. Have you spotted the problem?

The problem is that these configurations are not really defined as code. They are defined as declarations in a declarative language that are not Turing Complete code blocks.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Introduction to AWS CDK
  • Setting up your local environment and writing your first CDK app
  • Creating a containerized web application in AWS CDK using Docker
  • Understanding the inner workings of AWS CDK
You have been reading a chapter from
AWS CDK in Practice
Published in: Jun 2023
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781801812399
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at $19.99/month. Cancel anytime