After spending the last 6 months with AWS CDK - I'd kill to go back to using Terraform which is far from perfect but light years ahead of CDK which is the most consuming time sink I've ever had to work on, it's truly dreadful. Give me Terraform any day!

"time sink" is also how i would describe CF templates and wrappers like SAM. I'd be grateful if you could elaborate on the CDK issues.

I'm also curious to know how many people in this thread consider themselves developers as opposed to devops/cloud engineers.

There is so much toil involved in the software framework(s) around CDK, the most common CDK language is typescript - which while in many ways is better than JavaScript still suffers from the same garbage ecosystem.

The serious problem with CDK is that it's just a wrapper for CloudFormation - so you have all the limitations of a CFn backend with the added complexity of a full general programming language and ecosystem.

While Terraform is far from perfect you can land in a team, look at the terraform repo and immediately know what's going on, you've got very commonly used patterns / templates that can very quickly spin up your platform.

With CDK almost anything you create is a pet, a special snowflake that almost immediately becomes technical debt.

You end up spending a lot of time on maintenance and upkeep, updating libraries for (really bad!) node security patches, you have to test those updates across whatever packages and repos you're using them in, maintain software build/test/secure/deploy CI pipelines.

I've seen CDK at reasonable scale - it's painful with more than a couple of repos, even worse when they're spread across teams and products. With Terraform at least you just update Terraform itself after checking for breaking changes.

I could keep on ranting but I think no matter what I have seen and say - many developers will take a default position to arguing that infra/platform code is always better written in their language than any DSL, wrapper or templating system, I've heard this time and time again and only really agree with it when it's with Lambda only workloads, Often people cite "a real language is so much more powerful" etc... but in reality 99% of the time you just don't need highly complex programming logic when creating reliable and scalable platform using something like Terraform. (Insert "any fool can create something complex" quote here).

The one and only place I think CDK is genuinely a half-decent tool for the job is with Lambda only deployments as long as you keep it pretty lean don't don't over cook it with complexity and keep in mind that it's just CFn in the background so it has the same limitations.

I'm in a "DevOps" / platform engineering / automation role.

</poorly written midnight rant> :)

I really despise the node dependency of CDK as well. I really don’t want to have anything to do with the node ecosystem. If the CDK was a stand alone binary like the aws cli I would be much happier.

I’m not as experienced as you, but we have been using CDK for a lambda only system and it has been working well for us. CDK does have some warts, for example you can’t update multiple global secondarily indexes on a dynamodb table despite cloudformation having the capability.

I think the big advantage of the CDK is that it is more approachable for software engineers who do not have a lot of infrastructure experience. We currently are a dev team who also manage our infra and we do not have dedicated infra staff or devops/sre staff. Writing python code in a declarative style is easier for us devs instead of diving into terraformation.

Thanks for the detailed response.

“Broken time sink” is more inherent to CloudFormation than CDK per se - if you want to write code instead of config Pulumi is likely a better choice.

Consider reading some of the responses here - TF has state for a reason that the OP does not seem to touch on.