Publish your AWS CDK applications via AWS CloudFormation templates

AWS CDK is a great abstract to accelerate managing the cloud infrastructure as code. The journey will be enjoyful with leveraging the Construct Hub to use the high level contributions from AWS partners and commnunity.

Use Case

AWS CloudFormation is one of the underly technologies of AWS CDK to manage the cloud infrastructure. It easily to enable the IT administrators even business operators whom has no/limited developer skills to develop the end-to-end solutions with one-click user experience.

So it's a use case for effectively developing the Cloud Application via AWS CDK, then publishing it as CloudFormation template with better user experimental experience.

cdk synth command

CDK has a built-in capability to synthesize its application to CloudFormation templates, as known as the cdk synth command. You can upload the syntheized output templates to Amazon S3 bucket, then deploy it via AWS CloudFormation. Looks like it's quite easy to publish the CDK application as CloudFormation templates.

Why cdk synth does not work

However above procedure is not working in most case while orchestrating a large application in cloud. Due to the CDK applications probably contains assets which need be uploaded to S3 and ECR before deploying the application. For example, a CDK application with using Node.js Function, Python Function, S3 Deployment, Docker Image Assets and so on will be synthesized to the templates that are not deployable directly. It requires to publish those assets(both S3 and ECR assets) firstly, then deploy the templates with parameters pointing to the assets. This step is difficult to be completed manually, because the assets are named with its content hash are not readable by human being in CDK V1. CDK v2 uses the modern bootstrapping template which uses deterministic name for resources to remove the parameters, but it still depends on the assets published priorly before deploying the CloudFormation template.

cdk-assets command

Hence there is another experimental tool provided with CDK project, it's cdk-assets. cdk-assets command use the outputs of cdk synth, then publish the assets of application to S3 and ECR, and update the templates to refer to the assets in S3 and ECR. Looks like the utility perfectly fits the requirement of my use case.

cdk-assets drawbacks

But it still has some drawbacks for this solution. For some AWS services, the assets are mandatorily required from same region. It means that the Lambda code packages(reside on S3) must be from same region S3 bucket, the container images(reside on ECR) must be from same region of SageMaker training job / inference endpoint. For the applications with multiple regions support, we have to replicate above procedure in multiple times and provide multiple CloudFormation links per region like below. It means the users can not switch to another region via region selector after opening one of the links.

the solution cdk-bootstrapless-synthesizer

There is another commnuity tool cdk-bootstrapless-synthesizer to resolve above painful perfectly. It can help synthesize a single CloudFormation template entrypoint, then deploy it to any supported regions. Also it provides a pipeline example(based on AWS CodePipeline) to publish a CDK application to CloudFormation template with multiple regions supported.