'Infrastructure is Code with the AWS CDK - AWS Online Tech Talks' - TypeScript implementation

Background

Infrastructure is Code with the AWS CDK - AWS Online Tech Talks was easy to follow but done in Python (nothing bad about it!). While porting the demo project to TypeScript, I came across a few hurdles:

• @aws-cdk/aws-lambda won't package external dependencies, i.e.: uuid. This problem puzzled (and surprised) me and many others:

  • aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples#276
  • aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples#369
  • aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples#278

• The official CDK example api-cors-lambda-crud-dynamodb works but it requires building/watching TypeScript before calling cdk deploy, which doesn't feel like the best tooling experience.

• AWS documentation Creating a serverless application using the AWS CDK doesn't help either (surprise!).

• I ended up with the experimental @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-nodejs. This makes deploying Lambda written in JavaScript/TypeScript much easier. The overall experience is similar to serverless framework.

  const backend = new lambdaNodejs.NodejsFunction(this, 'handler', {
    entry: 'lambda/url-shortener.ts',
    handler: 'handler',
    runtime: lambda.Runtime.NODEJS_14_X,
    environment: {
      TABLE_NAME: table.tableName,
    },
  });

How to deploy

Prerequisite: your CLI should have access to AWS with suitable AWS_PROFILE and AWS_REGION.

• yarn - install dependencies
• cdk bootstrap - if you haven't got stack CDKToolkit on CloudFormation
• cdk deploy '*' - deploy all stacks to dev environment
• ENV=prod cdk deploy '*' - deploy all stacks to production environment