Tags: aws cdk cloudformation typescript tutorial
AWS CDK is a great framework to programmatically deploy cloudformation stack. If you are unfamiliar with AWS CDK, I would recommend first to check out Getting started with AWS CDK.
One of the pet peeves I have while designing cloudformation template is redundancy. I have to manually copy-paste the same properties across multiple resources. I wanted to leverage AWS CDK to create an interface that would allow tto dynamically create cloudformation. For the interface, I harked back to the good old CSV file.
For a simple example, let’s consider a simple cloudformation template
Parameters:
Environment:
Type: String
Default: dev
AllowedValues:
- dev
- qa
- prod
Description: Enter your environment
Project:
Type: String
Default: version
Description: Enter your version
What if we have to maintain 100 parameters, resources, etc in our project. Soon it will become tedious to maintain multiple resources. Instead, we create a class called Parameter
that we instantiate multiple times using different parameters. Here is a class diagram for our Parameter
class.
Using typescript, we can define the class as
We will create a `CSV` file under folder `resources` which would contain information for each instance of our class.
resource | create | category | default | description | allowed_values |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Environment | yes | parameter | dev | Enter your environment | dev | qa | prod |
Project | yes | parameter | version1 | Enter version |
First, we will read our CSV
file into our project. We would need to install an additional library to read the file.
$ npm i --save csvtojson
We will edit the lib/project_cdk-stack.ts
file.
Then we will create lib/helpers.ts
file.
Our code till now will not generate any cloudformation. However, we can test it for any compile errors
$ cdk synth --quiet
Next, we will implement our generateTemplate
function.
Lastly, we can deploy our cloudformation stack using
$ cdk deploy
In the next article, we will update our code to add additional classes to handle resources
, output
, etc for our cloudformation template.