AWS

I sat the AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C02) recently and passed. This is the retrospective I wish I had read before starting - what the exam actually tests, the services you need to know well, the concepts that trip people up, and which resources earned their place. I came in comfortable across most of the exam’s services from day-to-day work, so for me this was more about confirming and formalising what I already knew than learning it fresh. Your starting point will shape where you spend time, so calibrate the advice accordingly. ...

This is Chapter 1 of the DevSecOps Guardrails series. I wired cdk-nag in as the first guardrail in this series because it is CDK-native: it runs against the construct tree at synth time and blocks the build on any rule violation - before a changeset is created, before any AWS API call is made. It sees the construct level, not just the synthesised template, which means it can catch things cfn-lint cannot. ...

This is Chapter 5 of the Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK series. The same cdk deploy command that runs locally works in any pipeline - the differences are auth and orchestration. Common flags for CI These apply regardless of which CI system you use: cdk synth # generate CloudFormation template cdk deploy --require-approval never -c env=prod # deploy without interactive prompts cdk deploy --outputs-file outputs.json # write stack outputs to file --require-approval never skips the IAM change confirmation that CDK shows interactively. Required in CI. ...

This is Chapter 4 of the Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK series. Chapter 3 built FileProcessorConstruct - the tests here cover that construct and the stack it lives in. How CDK testing works CDK unit tests don’t deploy anything. They synthesize a stack into a CloudFormation template and run assertions against that template. No AWS credentials needed, and the suite runs in CI without any special setup. The aws_cdk.assertions module is already part of aws-cdk-lib - no extra install required. ...

This is Chapter 3 of the Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK series. Chapters 1 and 2 put the S3 bucket and Lambda directly in MyStack. Both get extracted into a reusable construct here. L1, L2, L3 CDK organises constructs into three levels: L1 - raw CloudFormation resource wrappers, prefixed with Cfn. CfnBucket, CfnFunction. No defaults added - every property must be set explicitly. L2 - CDK’s built-in higher-level constructs. s3.Bucket, _lambda.Function. These set sensible defaults, expose helper methods, and handle IAM via grant_* methods. L3 - composite constructs you write that bundle multiple resources into a single unit. The previous chapters used L2 constructs directly inside a stack. This chapter builds an L3. The problem The current MyStack creates the bucket and Lambda directly: ...