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.
Lecturer: [0:00] Now that our sample stack has been successfully deployed to AWS, let's take a minute to understand what exactly is happening under the hood. AWS CDK is actually using AWS CloudFormation under the hood in order to deploy our stacks into AWS.
[0:14] To learn more, let me visit the CloudFormation console. Here, we can see the landing page for AWS CloudFormation servers. These servers provides a common language to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in a safe, reputable way.
[0:27] In essence, with CloudFormation, we get to code our infrastructure using CloudFormation template language which is either YAML or JSON. That can be confusing because we are using TypeScript over here. What exactly is happening?
[0:41] In short, CDK is going to convert our code written in TypeScript to JavaScript which is then going to be converted into a CloudFormation template, and CloudFormation will be used to deploy our infrastructure. It sounds complicated, but 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.
[1:04] With that being said, let me go over here and click on stacks, and click on todo app stack that we have deployed. Let me expand that a little bit. Here, if I click on resources section, I can see that we have three groups of resources. We have resources connected to the queue, connected to the topic, and also some internal CDK metadata.
[1:25] If I expand this queue over here, we can see that we have created a queue policy, a topic, and all sorts of other things that we don't necessarily have to think about. What matters here is that we can see this todo app queue over here which is an instance of AWS SQS queue. If I go back to my code, this is exactly the same queue that I have defined over here in TypeScript.
[1:49] We can clearly see this connection between our TypeScript code and the actual cloud resources that are created in an AWS account.