Understanding the value of Cloud Development Kit

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

However, they also have several problems that its successor, Cloud Development Kit (CDK), can 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 its testing capabilities since this was one of the main headaches with IaC.

Testing infrastructure

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 to do is 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 the only working way we...