Your complete journey from first-time CDK user to seasoned infrastructure wizard.
We’ll cover everything — from the basics to production-ready patterns — with fun, hands-on lessons.
- What is AWS CDK?
- Why use AWS CDK over CloudFormation/Terraform?
- Key concepts (App, Stack, Construct, Stage, Bootstrap)
- Installation & configuration
- Your first CDK project
- Lesson 1: Creating Your First Stack (S3 Bucket)
- Lesson 2: Adding More Resources (DynamoDB, Lambda)
- Lesson 3: Resource Properties, Removal Policies, and Tags
- Lesson 4: Parameters, Context, and Environment Variables
- Lesson 5: Multi-Stack Applications & Cross-Stack References
- Lesson 6: Using L1, L2, and L3 Constructs
- Lesson 7: Custom Constructs — Your Own Building Blocks
- Lesson 8: IAM Permissions & Policies in CDK
- Lesson 9: Multi-Environment Deployments (dev, staging, prod)
- Lesson 10: Asset Management (S3 Assets, Lambda Code)
- Lesson 11: CDK Pipelines for CI/CD
- Lesson 12: Testing Your Infrastructure
- Lesson 13: Advanced Stack Design & Organization
- Lesson 14: Performance & Cost Optimization with CDK
- Lesson 15: Security Best Practices in AWS CDK
By the end of this journey, you will:
- Understand every moving part of AWS CDK.
- Be able to design, deploy, and maintain production-grade infrastructure.
- Write clean, reusable constructs like a pro.
- Confidently handle multi-environment, multi-account setups.
- Optimize for security, cost, and scalability.
- Learn by doing → every lesson comes with exercises.
- Reinforce → each lesson has solved examples + challenges for you.
- Progressive difficulty → you’ll build from single resources to complex architectures.
- Have fun → expect jokes, emojis, and zero YAML nightmares.
Before we start, make sure you have:
- Basic programming skills in TypeScript (or willingness to learn as we go).
- AWS CLI installed and configured (
aws configure). - Node.js ≥ 18.x installed.
- An AWS account (free tier is fine).
- A good attitude (this is mandatory 😉).
In the next lesson (Lesson 1: Creating Your First Stack), we’ll:
- Install CDK
- Initialize a project
- Deploy your first AWS resource
- Learn the basics of the CDK lifecycle
Let’s go build some clouds ☁️!