Seven years of the AWS CDK
Written on the seventh anniversary of the AWS CDK announcement: why TerraConstructs reimagines that same high level interface on top of Terraform, and who it is for.
by Vincent De Smet
This day marks exactly seven years since the public announcement of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWSCDK), a brilliant piece of work that I've long admired for its elegance, sophistication, and bold vision.
Over the past year, I've been reimagining that same high level interface on top of Terraform. Primarily to adapt it for environments where the original may not have gained traction. Sometimes due to tech stack limitations, team capabilities, or simply different tooling preferences.
This journey has only deepened my appreciation for the original team's meticulous design, and for Elad in particular, who’s been a driving and visible force behind the project. While no one person builds something this impactful alone, his contributions have clearly left a lasting imprint!
By bringing this design into another industry-shifting framework like Terraform, I hope to showcase its brilliance and combine the strengths of both ecosystems. More importantly, I hope to make these core ideas more accessible to a broader audience and maybe even spark the same excitement I felt when I first worked through the original AWS CDK workshop myself.
Above all, I hope, the original team sees this as the sincerest form of flattery!
This was first published as the foreword to the TerraConstructs AWS intro workshop.