Innovative Thinking Contributing to the AWS Cloud Development Kit The AWS CDK solves an important problem by providing a true software language interface to AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation has limitations that are better solved in a programming language. Infrastructure as code has been around for a few years now, but is AWS CloudFormation really code? How do you share a standard AWS WAF configuration with your company? Written by Intuit Blog Team Published Nov 15, 2018 - [Updated Nov 10, 2022] 1 min read The AWS CDK solves an important problem by providing a true software language interface to AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation has limitations that are better solved in a programming language. Infrastructure as code has been around for a few years now, but is AWS CloudFormation really code? How do you share a standard AWS WAF configuration with your company? The answer is, you can’t do this well because AWS CloudFormation is more configuration and less code. With the AWS CDK, developers can now: Version and release infrastructure code to the same repositories as application code (Nexus, NPM, PyPi, RubyGems, Artifactory, NuGet, GitHub). Use CDK support for programming languages, so code constructs like functions, inheritance, or conditional flow are no longer an odd notation in YAML or JSON, but are in the actual programming language the developers are using for application code. CDK supports TypeScript, .NET, Java, and JavaScript today. More languages are coming, and expect to see Golang, Python, and Ruby join the list. Reuse and consume CDK components, known as constructs, by using the dependency management tools already native to the developer’s programming language of choice. These features really enable a company to finally compose reusable AWS CloudFormation components that are tailored to the specific business needs of the company. Intuit Principal Engineer, Mike Cowgill shares his takeaways, contributions, and challenges with the AWS CDK on the AWS blog. Previous Post Tech Talk: How AI and Machine Learning Can Help People… Next Post #FutureProof: Blockchain for Trusted Transactions Written by Intuit Blog Team More from Intuit Blog Team Browse Related Articles Social Responsibility Intuit partners with The Farmlink Project to address climate change and combat food waste Life at Intuit How to become a better trans+ and non-binary ally Life at Intuit Here’s how women at Intuit inspire inclusion Taxpayer Empowerment Powering prosperity for women means addressing gender inequities in the tax code Job Readiness Powering prosperity, one community at a time Taxpayer Empowerment Setting the record straight on tax preparation Small Business Intuit acquires IP and hires talent from Proper Finance Canada Growing with Intuit Social Responsibility Intuit and Khan Academy team up to offer free financial education to students and teachers Innovative Thinking A new tool to make taxes more transparent