Level Up Your CDK DX: 5 Tools I’ve Been Building

Slides from 2026Q3 CDK community online meetup

Transcript

1. Level Up Your CDK DX: 5 Tools I’ve Been Building 2026Q3 CDK community online meetup 28/08/2026 Kenta Goto (GitHub: @go-to-k)
2. Kenta Goto (from Japan) • AWS Hero ‣ AWS DevTools Hero GitHub: @go-to-k • AWS CDK Contributor ‣ Top Contributor ‣ Community Reviewer
3. Overview ① cdkd (CDK Direct) ② cdk-local ③ cdk-real-drift ④ cdk-multi-region-stack ⑤ delstack
4. ① cdkd (CDK Direct) • Drop-in CDK CLI via direct AWS SDK instead of CloudFormation ‣ Fully drop-in CDK compatible - Your existing CDK app code runs as-is. - Just replace cdk deploy with cdkd deploy. ‣ Up to 15x faster deploys - Direct SDK calls, aggressive parallelization, and --no-wait to skip slow stabilization waits - Faster than Terraform and CloudFormation Express mode https://github.com/go-to-k/cdkd
5. Speed comparison with CDK CLI (CloudFormation) ※ Fastest time of three measurements ※ Express: CloudFormation Express Mode (2026/7~) More than 14x compared to CloudFormation More than 9x compared to Express mode
6. Use case for cdkd • cdkd complements CDK CLI rather than replacing it ‣ Use cdkd in dev/test for rapid iteration (with zero code changes) ‣ Use CDK CLI in stg/prod for full CloudFormation tooling (as usual) • Disposable and prototype environments in AI-driven development ‣ cdkd destroys super fast too • Ephemeral environments triggered by Pull Requests ‣ Dramatically reduces CI build times
7. ② cdk-local • CLI for running CDK-built application code locally ‣ Just run ̀cdkl <command> (e.g. start-api)̀ in your CDK project directory - ̀sam local̀ for CDK ‣ Related resource information can also be automatically retrieved from the AWS environment. - Run locally: Application code (e.g. Lambda) - Connect to real AWS resources: Secret / S3 / DB / etc. ‣ → No hand-written .env les, no hand-seeded test data fi https://github.com/go-to-k/cdk-local
8. ② cdk-local • Run in browser with ̀cdkl studiò command ‣ Pick a target, invoke or serve it, and watch every request, response, and log line land on one live timeline https://github.com/go-to-k/cdk-local
9. ③ cdk-real-drift • CDK drift detection tool ‣ Detects drift even on unde ned properties in CDK (CloudFormation) - Catches drift that ̀cdk drift̀ misses ‣ Can record, revert, or ignore fi https://github.com/go-to-k/cdk-real-drift
10. ④ cdk-multi-region-stack • De ne multi-region resources in a single CDK stack ‣ CloudFront: ap-northeast-1, ACM: us-east-1 ‣ 1 stack in CDK code → 1 CloudFormation stack per region at synth time fi https://github.com/go-to-k/cdk-multi-region-stack
11. ⑤ delstack • CloudFormation Stack Force Deletion Tool ‣ Force delete the entire stack with no orphaned resources - Including resources that fail with CFn deletion (or FORCE̲DELETE̲STACK) ‣ No custom recourses like the autoDeleteObjects for S3 https://github.com/go-to-k/delstack
12. Overview ① cdkd (CDK Direct) ② cdk-local ③ cdk-real-drift ④ cdk-multi-region-stack ⑤ delstack
13. Thank You!! Kenta Goto GitHub: @go-to-k