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Just as higher level languages like BASIC and C abstracted away the details of assembly language and made developers more productive, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) provides a programming model above the native template languages, a model that makes developers more productive when creating IaC. When you instantiate CDK objects in your Typescript (or Python, Java, etc.) application, those objects “compile” into a YAML template that the CDK deploys as an AWS CloudFormation stack. AWS Solutions Constructs take this simplification a step further by providing a library of common service patterns built on top of the CDK. These multi-service patterns allow you to deploy multiple resources with a single object, resources that follow best practices by default – both independently and throughout their interaction. Application Development Stack vs. IaC Development Stack Solution overview To demonstrate how using Solutions Constructs can accelerate the development of IaC, in this post you will create an architecture that ingests and stores sensor readings using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. Prerequisite – Setting up the CDK environment Tip – If you want to try this example but are concerned about the impact of changing the tools or versions on your workstation, try running it on AWS Cloud9. An AWS Cloud9 environment is launched with an AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) role and doesn’t require configuring with an access key. It uses the current region as the default for all CDK infrastructure. To prepare your workstation for CDK development, confirm the following: Node.js 10.3.0 or later is installed on your workstation (regardless of the language used to write CDK apps). You have configured credentials for your environment. If you’re running locally you can do this by configuring the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). TypeScript 2.7 or later is installed globally (npm -g install typescript) View the full article