Infrastructure IS Code - Intro to AWS CDK

In this tech-talk we are delighted to have with us Dr. Michael Mourao, Full Stack Developer at Nodes & Links and Vasos Koupparis, also a Full Stack Developer at Nodes & Links.

AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) became publicly available in July 2019, but it's already proving to be a juggernaut in the area of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), allowing developers to use their favourite programming language (TypeScript, Python, C#, Java are currently available), to provision cloud resources without having to worry about templates or learning custom-made languages. Furthermore, it provides concise and easy-to-use defaults, that have been optimised in terms of security and performance. We will demonstrate its use to build and deploy a serverless API, and get a glimpse of its full potential by showing how we used it for the deployment of multiple production and dev environments at Nodes & Links.

Agenda:

18:30 - Tech Talk Starts
20:00 - Q&A
20:30 - Drinks & Pizza

About the Speakers:
Dr. Michael Mourao is a mathematician turned software developer, with a doctorate in Mathematics from Warwick University (UK) and a Masters from Cambridge University (UK). He has over 6 years of experience in delivering enterprise-level, cloud-based applications to international organisations.
Vasos Koupparis is a software developer with a bachelor in Computer Science from the University of Surrey (UK). He has over 5 years of experience in web application development and architecting solutions on cloud services for both individuals and enterprises.

Structure of the talk:

1. What is AWS CDK?
2. Demo:
   2.1. Create a DynamoDB database table
   2.2. Create a Lambda function and an api endpoint to write to the table
   2.3. Deploy our application
   2.4. Create Fargate cluster and a docker task that runs when triggered by another Lambda function
   2.5. Redeploy the application
3. How we used AWS CDK at Nodes & Links to provision as many environments as we want using the same code
   3.1 20+ interdependent stacks for each environment
   3.2 Temporary cloud environments for feature development
   3.3 Tagging is easy!
4. Conclusion

Terminology Cheat-Sheet:
https://bit.ly/2OP9Sxl