Understanding the value of Cloud Development Kit

DSL-based instruments, such as CloudFormation and Terraform, are still the standard of infrastructure as code. They are well known, have a huge community worldwide, and keep developing.

However, they also have several problems that its successor, CDK, is able to solve.

In this section, we are going to take a sneak peek at what changes and value CDK is bringing to the industry.

We will start by looking at the testing capabilities, since this was one of the main headaches with infrastructure as code.

Testing infrastructure

In order to test a computer program, all we need to do is build it, and then run some written test scenarios. The expected behavior of the software is known, so all you need is to receive the proper result.

In Chapter 4, Continuous Integration and Deployment, we did this with CloudFormation by deploying our infrastructure and running specific infrastructure tests on it. For declarative tools, this is...