AWS CDK Cloud Development Kit

The Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation. Created by AWS in 2018 and now supporting multiple cloud providers via CDK tf for Terraform and CDK k8s for Kubernetes, CDK enables developers to use familiar programming languages to define infrastructure. Key features: multi-language support (define infrastructure using TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C, and Go with full IDE autocomplete, type checking, and refactoring support). Constructs (composable building blocks representing cloud resources, with three levels: L1 primitives mapping directly to CloudFormation, L2 curated defaults with sensible defaults and best practices, and L3 patterns combining multiple resources into complete architectures like VPC with subnets or ECS Fargate service with load balancer). Stacks and Apps (organize constructs into Stacks equivalent to CloudFormation stacks, and group stacks into Apps for deployment). Synthesis (CDK synthesizes infrastructure code into AWS CloudFormation templates, leveraging CloudFormation for deployment, rollback, drift detection, and stack policies). CDK Pipelines (continuous deployment library for building multi-environment, multi-account CI/CD pipelines with self-mutation capability). Construct Hub (community marketplace at constructhub.dev for sharing and discovering CDK constructs across all languages and providers). CDK for Terraform (cdktf) converts CDK constructs into Terraform HCL configuration for deploying infrastructure on any Terraform-supported provider. CDK for Kubernetes (cdk8s) generates Kubernetes manifests from code without CloudFormation dependency. jsii (technology enabling code written in one language to be consumed from all supported languages, powering CDK multi-language support).