AWS Community Nordics Virtual Meetup - CDK Crash Course
The September AWS Community Nordics virtual meetup was dedicated to the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and it turned out to be one of the most popular events of the year with 177 attendees. CDK was rapidly gaining adoption as people discovered the benefits of defining cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages instead of YAML or JSON templates. The speaker was Ari Palo, an AWS Community Builder and Lead Technologist at Alma Media, who delivered a thorough CDK Crash Course packed with tips and tricks.
Ari’s crash course format worked well for this topic. He covered the fundamentals of CDK – how it works, how it relates to CloudFormation under the hood, and how to get started with your first CDK project. He walked through practical examples of defining infrastructure in TypeScript, showing how constructs, stacks, and apps fit together, and shared the kind of detailed tips that you only learn from running CDK in production.
What made CDK exciting for many attendees was the shift from declarative to imperative infrastructure definition. Being able to use loops, conditionals, and abstractions from a real programming language to define your AWS resources was a game changer. Ari’s live coding demonstrations made this tangible and accessible even for those who were completely new to CDK.
The chat was buzzing throughout the event. People shared their own CDK experiences, asked about migration paths from CloudFormation, and debated the merits of different programming languages for CDK projects. TypeScript seemed to be the community favorite, though Python had its advocates as well.
This was another Nordic-wide online event, and the collaboration continued to pay dividends. Having attendees from across the region enriched the discussion and brought different perspectives. The virtual format, now several months in, was starting to feel natural, and the community had developed a good rhythm for online events. For anyone who had been on the fence about trying CDK, Ari’s session was the push they needed.
