AWS CDK - access to the new features

Question

AWS CDK being a relatively new tool might have some missing high level constructs (such as NACL as the time of writing this question - https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/3621 ).

My understanding is that AWS CDK is developed using Typescript.

Would selecting Typescript as the IaC language give faster access (compared to python, other) to the newly available constructs?

Pre-release/Dev versions?

Answer 1

My understanding is that AWS CDK is developed using Typescript.

That's correct, from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/getting_started.html

Why do you need Node.js when you're a Python, C♯, or Java developer?

The AWS CDK is developed in TypeScript and transpiled to JavaScript. Bindings for the other supported languages make use of the AWS CDK engine running on Node.js, as does the cdk command-line tool.

Would selecting Typescript as the IaC language give faster access (compared to python, other) to the newly available constructs?

There would have to be a very good reason why a new feature is not exposed at the same time to all languages. All we know is the bindings for the other languages use the CDK running on Node.js - so it looks like NodeJS would be first cab off the rank if any.

Answer 2

CDK is released with all bindings at the same time. So choosing one particular language won't provide any benefit. There's one exception though: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@aws-cdk/assert

The assert package is only available for Typescript as far as I know. I personally use Python and miss this package a lot . Unit testing CDK infrastructure is very ugly without native support.