CloudFormation and the CDK
Lesson 1 of 4 in Provisioning ML Infrastructure as Code.
The blueprint asks you to provision and configure deployment resources; this module is about doing it as code, not by clicking. AWS CloudFormation is the engine — a declarative JSON/YAML template describing desired state, deployed as a stack that creates, updates, and deletes resources as a unit. The AWS CDK is a front end to that engine: you write constructs in TypeScript or Python, cdk synth compiles them into a CloudFormation template, and cdk deploy hands it to the same engine. One mental model, exam-ready: CDK writes templates; CloudFormation executes them.
| CloudFormation | CDK | |
|---|---|---|
You write | Declarative JSON/YAML templates | TypeScript/Python (also Java, C#, Go) constructs |
Abstraction | Raw resources, every property explicit | L2/L3 constructs bake in defaults; loops, conditionals, reuse |
Preview | Change sets |
|
Runtime | Stacks, rollback, drift detection | Identical — it is CloudFormation after synth |
The tell | "Declarative template", org-standard YAML | "Define infrastructure in Python/TypeScript" |
Interactive checkpoint quiz (2 questions) — open this page in a browser to take it.