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Yuck - the CDK is everything I dislike about IaaS. Not everything needs to be actual code.

Complexity management is an often overlooked parameter of reliable infrastructure.

YEah but have you ever managed a large CFN project. You'll wish you had something more expressive than YAML

Yes, I have. Strongly prefer plain CF.

The purpose of CDK is exactly to reduce the complexity of your IaC. It automatically sets up all kinds of defaults, such as required permissions between different cloud resources that need to talk to each other. The underlying complex things are handled by AWS-managed library code.

This doesn't even include one of the most useful features of CDK: truly modular components. I can create a module used 100 times and all you have to worry about is the constructor and inputs instead of the nightmarish lack of reusability in other IaC.

You can also dump the CloudFormation template to a file to inspect it or feed it into other tooling.

How does that differ from terraform modules?

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