CDK Corner – February 2021

CDK Day is coming up on April 30th! This is your chance to meet and engage with the CDK Community! Last year’s event included an incredible amount of content, whether it was learning the origin story of CDK, learning how CDK is used in a Large Enterprise, there were many great sessions, as well as Eric Johnson cosplaying as the official CDK Mascot.

Do you have a story to share about using CDK, about something funny/crazy/interesting/cool/another adjective? The CFPs are now open — the community wants to hear your stories; so go ahead and submit here!

Updates: Changes made across CDK

In January, the CDK Community and the AWS CDK team were together hard at work, bringing in new changes, features, or, as NetaNir likes to call them, many new “goodies” to the CDK!

AWS Construct Library and Core

The CDK Team announced General Availability of the EKS Module in CDK with PR#12640. Moving a CDK Module from Experimental to Stable requires substantial effort from both the CDK Community and Team — the appreciation for everyone that contributed to this effort cannot be understated. Take a look at the project milestone to explore some of the work that contributed to releasing the EKS constrcut to GA. Great job everyone!

External assets are now supported from PR#12259. With this change, you can now setup cdk-assets.json with Files, Archives, or even Docker Images built by external utilities. This is great if your CDK Application relies on assets from other sources, such as an internal pipeline, or if you want to pull the latest Docker Image built from some external utility.

CDK will now alert you if your stack hits the maximum number of CloudFormation Resources. If you’re deploying complex CDK Stacks, you’ll know that sometimes you will hit this cap which seems to only happen when you’ve walked away from your computer to make a coffee while your stack is deploying, only to come back with a latte and a command line full of exceptions. This wonderful quality-of-life change was merged in PR#12193.

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild in CDK can now be configured with Standard 5.0 Runtime Environments, which now supports many new runtime environments, including support for Python 3.9 which means, for example, CodeBuild now natively understands the union operator in Python dictionaries you’ve been using to combine dictionaries in your project.

AWS EC2

There is now support for m6gd and r6gd Graviton EC2 Instances from CDK with PR#12302. Graviton Instances are a great way to utilize ARM Archicture at a lower cost.

Support for new io2 and and gp3 EBS Volumes were announced at re:Invent, followed up with a community contribution from leandrodamascena in PR#12074

AWS ElasticSearch

A big cost savings feature to support ElasticSearch UltraWarm nodes in CDK, now gives CDK users the opportunity to store data in S3 instead of an SSD with ElasticSearch, which can substantially reduce storage costs.

AWS S3

Securing S3 Buckets is a standard practice, and CDK has tightened its security on S3 Buckets by limiting the PutObject permission of Bucket.grantWrite() to just s3:PutObject instead of s3:PutObject*. This subtle change means that only the first permission is added to the IAM Principal, instead of any other IAM permission prefixed with PutObject (Such as s3:PutObjectAcl). You still have the flexibility to make this permission add-on if needed, though.

AWS StepFunctions

A member of the CDK Community, ayush987goyal, submitted PR#12436 for StepFunctions-Tasks. This feature now lets users specify the family and revision of a taskDefinitionFamily inside EcsRunTask, thanks to their effort. This modifies previous behavior of the construct where a user could only deploy the latest revision of a Task by supplying the ARN of the Task.

CloudFormation and new L1 Resources

As CDK synthesizes CloudFormation Templates, it’s important that CDK stays up to date with the CloudFormation Resource Specification these updates to our collection of L1 Constructs. Now that they’re here, the community and team can begin implementing beautiful L2 Constructs for these L1s. Interested in contributing an L2 from these L1s? Take a look at our CONTRIBUTING doc to get up and running.

In January the team introduced several updates of the CloudFormation Resource Spec to CDK, bringing support for a whole slew of new Resources, Attribute Updates and Property Changes. These updates, among others, include new resource types for CloudFormation Modules, SageMaker Pipelines, AWS Config Saved Queries, AWS DataSync, AWS Service Catalog App Registry, AWS QuickSight, Virtual Clusters for EMR Containers for Amazon Elastic MapReduce, support for DNSSEC in Route53, and support for ECR Public Repositories.

My favorite of all these is ECR Public Repositories. Public Repositories support was just recently announced, in December at AWS re:Invent. Now you can deploy and manage a public repository with CDK as an L1 Construct. So, if you have an exciting Container Image that you’ve been wanting to share with the world with your own Public Repository, set it all up with CDK!

To be in the know on updates to the CDK, and updates to CDK’s CloudFormation Resource Spec, update your repository notification settings to watch for new CDK Releases , and browse the cfnspec CHANGELOG.

Learning: Level up your CDK Knowledge

AWS has released a new training module for the CDK. This free 7 module course teaches users the fundamental concepts of the CDK, from explaining its core benefits, to defining the common language and terms, to tips for troubleshooting CDK Projects. This is a great course for developers, or related stakeholders who may be considering whether or not to adopt CDK in their team or organization.

Community Acknowledgements: Thanks for your hard work

We love highlighting Pull Requests from our community of CDK users. This month’s spotlight goes to Jacob-Doetsch, who submitted a fix when deploying Bastion Hosts backed by ARM Architecture. As ARM based architecture increases in usage across AWS, identifying and resolving these types of bugs helps CDK maintain the ability to help Developers continue moving quickly. Great job Jacob!

And finally, to round out the CDK Corner, a round of applause to the following users who merged their first Pull Request to CDK in January! The CDK Community appreciates your hard work and effort!

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