Best practices for using the AWS CDK in TypeScript to create IaC projects

Sandeep Gawande, Mason Cahill, Sandip Gangapadhyay, Siamak Heshmati, and Rajneesh Tyagi, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

February 2024 (document history)

This guide provides recommendations and best practices for using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) in TypeScript to build and deploy large-scale infrastructure as code (IaC) projects. The AWS CDK is a framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning that infrastructure through AWS CloudFormation. If you don't have a well-defined project structure, building and managing an AWS CDK codebase for large-scale projects can be challenging. To deal with these challenges, some organizations use anti-patterns for large-scale projects, but these patterns can slow down your project and create other issues that negatively impact your organization. For example, anti-patterns can complicate and slow down developer onboarding, bug fixes, and the adoption of new features.

This guide provides an alternative to using anti-patterns and shows you how to organize your code for scalability, testing, and alignment with security best practices. You can use this guide to improve code quality for your IaC projects and maximize your business agility. This guide is intended for architects, technical leads, infrastructure engineers, and any other role seeking to build a well-architected AWS CDK project for large-scale projects.