Hands-On AWS CDK

Chapter 1. Getting Started with CDK

This book is project driven. We want you to get hands-on and learn by building. We start by introducing the project that you will be building throughout the book. After introducing the project, we will get you all set up with your development environment and prerequisites so that we can begin building in Chapter 2. In this chapter, we will cover just a bit more background so that we can hit the keyboard right away with all the subsequent chapters.

We want to give a friendly warning that if you are brand new to cloud development, IT administration, or AWS, this chapter may feel challenging. If you have some experience, this may be a bit more accessible, but some concepts may still be new. In designing the book, we made conscious decisions to avoid the “easy route” if it was going to instill bad habits for security and cost optimization. This means the learning curve may feel a bit steep in this first chapter, but in the long run, you will be a stronger cloud developer for it. That said, please do provide feedback where we can make the directions simpler or clearer; we are always looking for ways to make these topics more accessible while still providing expert-level knowledge and skills.

Let’s take a deep breath and go step by step. In this chapter, you will learn:

• How to set up your AWS account

• How to set up the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)

• How to set up your development environment

• How to set up your first project

To get started ...