Review an AWS CloudFormation stack deployed with AWS CDK
Now that our initial stack has been deployed it's time to dig into AWS Console to see what exactly did we deploy.
Cloud Development Kit is built on top of CloudFormation which is an AWS service that allows you to describe a stack in AWS using a static file (either YAML or JSON).
In essence - it's going to convert our code written in TypeScript, to JavaScript, which will be then converted to CloudFormation and CloudFormation will be used to deploy our infrastructure.
Sounds complicated, right? Luckily CDK abstracts a lot of things away from us, so we get to focus on solving our problems instead of writing YAML by hand.
In this lesson we're going to learn how to review an AWS CDK stack deployment in CloudFormation console.
Instructor: [0:00] Now that our to-do app stack has been deployed, let's take a look inside of AWS console to see what exactly have we deployed. AWS cloud development kit is built on top of CloudFormation. In order to review our stack, we have to go to CloudFormation.
[0:12] What is AWS CloudFormation? A CloudFormation provides a common language to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your environment in a safe, reputable way. What that means is that we get to code our infrastructure using the CloudFormation template, which can be either YUM or JSON.
[0:28] Since we are using CDK, we are not going to do YUM, we are not going to do JSON. What's going to happen instead is that our code over here is going to be translated into CloudFormation template. We get to write a code and a CloudFormation template is going to be created for us. Afterwards, a stack is going to be deployed to AWS.
[0:45] In order to review our stack, go over here and click on view stacks. Alternatively, you can also expand this section and click on stacks over here. Now we can see our to-do app stack over here. Let's click and then review it. We can see a bunch of things here.
[0:57] First up, there's the stack ID and also a status of this stack has been successfully created. We can also take a look into resources section. Those are the resources that we managed to deploy with CDK. There's an SQSQ and also an SNS topic. Both of those things were defined in our CDK stack over here.
[1:14] We can also take a look at our CloudFormation template. If we click on Template, we're going to see the CloudFormation template that was generated for us by CDK and this is the cloud that we don't have to maintain.
[1:25] We actually have to maintain this part which is -- as you can see -- significantly shorter and honestly easier to understand than this YAML file because both of those are describing exactly the same infrastructure. We can also take a look at our stack in more visual way.
[1:38] If I click on Viewing Design over, we are going to see the CloudFormation designer tool which allows us to see a visual representation of our CloudFormation stack. We can see the SNS topic over here, the SQSQ over here and also how those pieces are connected together.
[1:51] This is important to know because once we ship larger infrastructures with AWS CDK, it is important to be able to see how exactly are those pieces connected together.