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Emma Moinat for AWS Community Builders

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What's Next for CDK? 👀

Last week we had the yearly CDK Day where we saw many talks from all around the world. If you missed it you can find the schedule and links to all the talks here.

One of the talks was from the CDK team where they talked about the recent improvements of CDK and what is coming next. You can find the talk here:
Meet the CDK team

Recent Improvements

Some enhancements from this year were:

  1. Improved L2 Construct Coverage ⛱️
  2. Policy Validation at Synth Time 🫶
  3. Improved Permissions Boundaries via Bootstrap 🔐
  4. App Staging Synthesizer 🎛️

What's Next?

New Channel

CDK are launching a new YouTube channel called CDK Live. This will not only be about hearing from AWS but hearing from the community too.

This will become the go to source for anything related to AWS CDK. The channel will be a blend of tutorials, deep dives and interviews with industry experts. 🆒

Improvements

From listening to their users, the CDK team have flagged the areas they wish to improve by the end of this year and beyond.

Speed

CDK is slow, this we can all agree on. This is mostly caused by CloudFormation.

You'll be glad to hear that the CloudFormation and the CDK teams are working together to improve this.

According to the CDK team, we can expect some big performance improvements before the end of the year. 🎉

Migration

If you have existing cloud resources it is currently quite challenging to shift these resources into CDK.

The CDK team will be introducing a cdk migrate capability.

The basic principle here is to take a CloudFormation template and autogenerate some CDK code.

This is actually already available but is still an experimental feature so there are no guarantees about the outcome or stability of the functionality.

Refactoring

This was the most voted RFC.

As developers, we want to be able to refactor the CDK code and for CDK to be smart enough to not just recreate resources from scratch but to relocate them, for example, into another stack.

This will potentially be available officially at the start of next year. 🤞


These are some of the main areas the CDK team will be focusing on in the upcoming months but of course, as always, there will be improvements for construct coverage, and many other enhancements.

I hope you are also excited for what is to come next for CDK.

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