CDK Corner – August 2021

We’re now well into the dog days of summer but that hasn’t slowed down the community one bit. In the past few months the team has delivered 3 big features that I think the community will love. The biggest new feature is the Construct Hub Developer Preview. Alex Pulver describes it as “a one-stop destination for finding, reusing, and sharing constructs”. The Construct Hub features constructs created by AWS, AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners, and the community. While the Construct Hub only includes TypeScript and Python constructs today, we will be adding support for the remaining jsii-supported languages in the coming months.

The next big release is the General Availability of CDK Pipelines. Instead of writing a new blog post for the General Availability launch, Rico updated the original announcement post to reflect updates made for GA. CDK Pipelines is a high-level construct library that makes it easy to set up a continuous deployment pipeline for your CDK-based applications. CDK Pipelines was announced last year and has seen several improvements, such as support for Docker registry credentials, cached builds, and getting started templates. To get started with your own CDK Pipelines, refer to the original launch blog post, that Rico has kindly updated for the GA announcement.

Since the launch of AWS CDK, customers have asked for a way to test their CDK constructs. The CDK assert library was previously only available for constructs written in TypeScript. With this new release, in which we have re-written the assert library to support jsii and renamed it the assertions library, customers can now test CDK constructs written in any supported language. The assertions library enables customers to test the generated AWS CloudFormation templates that a construct produces to ensure that the construct is designed and implemented properly. In June, Niranjan delivered an initial version of the assert library available in all supported languages. The RFC for “polyglot assert” describes the motivation fot this feature and some examples for using it.

Some key new constructs for AWS services include: – New L1 Constructs for AWS Location Services – New L2 Constructs for AWS CodeStar Connections – New L2 Constructs for Amazon CloudFront Functions – New L2 Constructs for AWS Service Catalog App Registry

This edition’s featured contribution comes from AWS Community Hero Philipp Garbe. Philipp added the ability to load Docker images from an existing tarball instead of rebuilding it from a Dockerfile.