AWS re:Invent is currently going on and there are so many new announcements. It is hard to have an overview of all of them so I am summarizing my top announcements of the last few days. These are mainly the announcements of Werner Vogel's keynote.
Let's go!
CDK 2.0
CDK 2.0 is out! It has a lot of features and I will cover them in my own blog post. Let's start with some of the most exciting features.
Single package
There is one CDK package now available. Currently, you need to install several packages when working wit CDK. If I take a look at my zsh history I find the following
yarn add @aws-cdk
yarn add @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-event-sources
yarn add @aws-cdk/aws-secretsmanager
yarn add @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-nodejs
And believe me, that is just a short excerpt of the whole history. With CDK 2.0 you just have the package aws-cdk-lib and that's it!
CDK Watch
CDK Watch lets you watch your code of your CDK stack and deploy it whenever a change happens. This enables fast inner-loop development since all new changes will be deployed instantly. You can configure this by including and excluding certain files. I'd start with a staging env 😉
CDK API Improvements
The API reference was updated with a lot more code snippets and additional documentation
Assertion library for unit tests
There is a new library called aws-cdk-lib.assertions module to enable developers to better write unit tests for CDK stacks.
Constructs Hub
The new constructs hub is live.
You can find constructs for CDK in here. Mainly it is for
- CDK
- CDK for Terraform
- CDK for Kubernetes
Just search for a construct and you will find a lot of example code
It has great examples and code snippets to get started quickly with CDK!
For example if I look for appsync transformer I can find some great constructs for using Amplify's graphql transformer in CDK for all different languages.
re:Post - Question & Answering tool
We all have AWS questions from time to time. AWS published a new platform called re:Post that AWS used internally for answering AWS related questions.
Everbody can read questions and answers and everybody with an AWS account can ask and answer questions.
This is a great time for technical AWS people to flex their AWS skills and a great tool for helping out with AWS problems. You can also gain some reputation points 😉
Check it out here
Three new AWS SDKs
There are 3 new AWS SDKs:
- Rust
- Swift
- Kotlin
All three are now in developer preview. This enables functional programming applications and native mobile applications the extended access to AWS!
Amplify Studio - Real fullstack development
This is one I am really excited about. Amplify's vision in general (IMO) is already to enable developer to build fullstack apps without the hassle of becoming an AWS export. They further support this vision by introducing Amplify Studio.
Amplfiy Studio is a no-code/low-code tool that lets you build frontend and backend components:
Frontend
The front end is built by using Figma and Amplify together. You have some default components built by the Amplify team and you can synchronize them between Figma and Amplify.
You can then adjust your components in Figma, synchronize them, and give them custom props in Amplify.
After that you can simply use them in your react application like that:
This is a really great approach, especially for designers and developers to work more closely together.
Backend
For the backend development, the Admin UI is now Amplify Studio. You can create your data model and add additional services for that. Not too much changed here.
Sustainability Pillar
Werner Vogels introduced the new sustainability pillar in the AWS Well-Architected framework. The Well-Architected framework builds the basic pillars of building cloud applications. Sustainability was added because more and more companies are interested in how their applications affect the environment. The goal is to reduce the bad effects on the environment and that is why the sustainability pillar was introduced.
Final Words
These were just some of the amazing announcements so far. If you want to more about them, consider following my Twitter 🙂