AWS CDK

Overview

Domain expertise for CDK construct authoring, deployment workflows, compliance, drift, importing resources, safe refactoring, and troubleshooting CDK CLI / CloudFormation errors.

When NOT to use:

Raw CloudFormation YAML/JSON. SAM. Terraform/Pulumi. CI/CD beyond CDK Pipelines. Use builtin knowledge or specialized skills for these.

Critical Warnings

Deadly embrace

Removing a cross-stack reference deadlocks deployment. Two-deploy fix required: (1) remove consumer import + add

this.exportValue()

on producer, deploy; (2) remove

exportValue()

, deploy again. See

troubleshooting-deployment

.

Construct ID changes cause replacement

Renaming/moving a construct changes its logical ID → CloudFormation replaces the resource (data loss for stateful resources). Always

cdk diff

before deploy. See

refactor-and-prevent-replacement

.

UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED

Stack is stuck. Fix with

cdk rollback $STACK

or

cdk rollback $STACK --orphan

. See

troubleshooting-deployment

.

Non-empty S3 buckets persist after destroy

You MUST set both removalPolicy: DESTROY and autoDeleteObjects: true . Versioned buckets are worse — delete markers persist even after apparent deletion. Common Workflows Show more