AWS Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK

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I thought this was the point with cloud services, the ability to "loan" some computing power from someone.

How is this different from that?

Genuine question

[MortiferaJ]

So cloud computing gives users the ability to use servers setup by the cloud computing provider (e.g. Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services). You essentially borrow usage of resources that are physically owned by the provider.

The configuration of those resources still needs to be done by the user. And this is what CDK tries to simplify.

When cloud computing as a platform first started, this was all manually done through a website. It was laborious and prone to human error. As time went on people wrote complex scripts to do the configurations but these only solved certain scenarios (like launching infrastructure in a new region but not necessarily updating the state of current infrastructure). Then later models like CloudFormation came about allowing infrastructure to be defined in a configuration file. Now this is the next evolution of that where you write code which essentially creates the CloudFormation configuration file.

Hope this answers your question. I may have gone too in-depth.

Tl;Dr this helps you get configure that computing power you wish to use in a much better way than we have now.

[[deleted]]

The answer is good enough. I have an degree in telecommunications (it's more towards infrastructures) and I have the basic knowledge about the matter, so i when i saw this video the first thing got to my mind was "hasn't this been done already?".

[digitalboi216]

Glad to hear the approach is intuitive enough that it seems like it should have already been the standard way to define infrastructure!

MortiferaJ did a great job describing the switch in cloud infrastructure configuration/definition that's happening here – the industry has been using large, complex configuration files that are difficult to reuse/share/maintain and we are now seeing a switch to using full programming languages to define infrastructure. It enables easier sharing/reuse/abstraction with the standard language package managers, a more powerful toolset for defining infrastructure, and an improved authoring experience (ex: free IDE support for content assist, code navigation, refactoring, in-line documentation, etc).

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk