I am now an AWS SAA! Exciting. I still need to write and upload notes for the remaining section that I promised to put up, so that may take a few more weeks, but overall I think this studying strategy did work well for me.
In other news, I’ve begun experimenting with the AWS CDK and it feels way better to use than Terraform or CloudFormation by itself. AWS has definitely improved their CloudFormation offering and made the right move by creating the CDK.
To me, the CDK is interesting because it marks another evolution in IaC. I believe IaC has evolved in the following manner:
- Purely imperative (boto3, bash scripts)
- Purely declarative (CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Declarative code written by imperative code (CDK)
The CDK combines the stability/reliability of declarative code with the expressive power of imperative code. I like it a lot.
That being said, I’m sure that Terraform, Pulumi, raw CloudFormation, and all the pre-CDK IaC tools out there are still being used today and will be used extensively in the future. Don’t rewrite your Terraform to CDK. But if you got a clean slate, give CDK a shot.