EC2 - ELB deploy using Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

The following experiment aims to show some feature of Cloud Development Kit. Typescript is used for the example while CDK, at the date, also supports: Python, JavaScript, .NET and Java.

Goal

Deploy three EC2 within private subnets of a VPC, served by a ELB as shown below.

What you need

• Your fav IDE
• Node.js
• cdk
• AWS Account *(if you want to deploy your stack)
• aws-cli (configured with a role that allows to run CloudFormation stack and create resources)

Getting started

Here you can find the start guide to CDK. In case you want to start from scratch, you have to initialize a new cdk project in your favourite directory, trhough:

cdk init --language typescript

Generate CloudFormation from Source Code

Once you write your code following the CDK API Reference, you can generate your CloudFormation stack through a simple command:

npm run build

and then

cdk synth

In particular the last command will produce the CloudFormation JSON within ~/youp-roject/cdk.out/prjName.template.json

Note

If you want to use all AZs within a region to create High Available and Fault Tolerant application, you have to specify Region and Account in bin/elb-ec2-monitoring.ts file. Here the example:

new ElbEc2MonitoringStack(app, 'ElbEc2MonitoringStack',{
    env:{
        region: "XXX", //example: eu-west-1
        account: "YYY",//Insert your account here, if you want a correct Subnet creation per each AZ in the region
    }
});

Useful commands

• npm run build compile typescript to js
• npm run watch watch for changes and compile
• npm run test perform the jest unit tests
• cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
• cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template