A Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is a developer tool built on the open source Constructs model. We now have multiple CDKs:
Do you want to attend? We'd love you to, Tickets are free
Schedule
This time we are running two parallel YouTube streams so that we can cram even more CDK goodness into a shorter overall event. We staggered the streams so that everyone can join for our opening and closing talks. The date and time shown below has been localised by sessionize to your time zone, on the off chance you think it is wrong the event kicks off at 2pm UTC on 30th April 2021.
Full Sessions
These sessions are a 30 minute slot with a 10 minute Q&A. There are four levels of talk targeted at different experience levels:
- - Introductory and Overview (suitable for brand new to CDK)
- - Intermediate (have used CDK a bit)
- - Advanced (use CDK regularly)
- - Expert (love everything about CDK)
Avoid bad things in PROD by testing CDK
You all love writing great CDK code, and to see it deploy to PROD. But, things tend to go wrong, and its bad to notice that in PROD. Let's talk about how you can apply software testing strategies to your CDK code to ensure that the infrastructure you are deploying is actually the one you want!
Expert Level
Darko Mesaroš
Senior Developer Advocate @ AWS
Better together: AWS CDK and AWS SAM
I demonstrate building a serverless application using the CDK. I also show using the SAM CLI for local testing and debugging. At the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of how CDK and SAM work together to help you develop, test, and deploy serverless applications efficiently.
Intermediate Level
Eric Johnson
Principal Developer Advocate - Serverless @AWS
Code gen with Projen
Let’s have some fun and try to use projen to synthesize source code. See how meta can we get before our brain explodes...
Advanced Level
Elad Ben Israel
I work on the CDK
Deploy your React/Next JS app with CDK
In my talk I will go over two ways of deployment and development of React and Next JS applications:
1) Using CDK patterns
2) Using Amplify for front end and AWS CDK for the front end; and demonstrate one of them.
Introductory and Overview Level
Natalia Marek
Apprentice Software Developer, Infinity Works
Extending constructs of the CDK for Terraform
In this talk I'm going to explore extending the constructs of the CDK for Terraform with useful methods like for example "grantRead" which is already known from the AWS CDK.
Intermediate Level
Ansgar Mertens
Senior Software Engineer at HashiCorp
How we scale CDK within Liberty Mutual
Software Accelerator is a community driven platform to facilitate the sharing of reusable patterns within Liberty Mutual. Come see how Liberty Mutual delivers engineering best practices, serverless patterns, & enterprise compliant infrastructure as code using CDK & the Software Accelerator.
Introductory and Overview Level

Greg Bomkamp
Liberty Mutual, Senior Software Engineer
Nick Manuel
Liberty Mutual, Senior Software Engineer
Rajesh Poraiyan
Liberty Mutual, Senior Architect
Mistakes I made writing Infrastructure as Code, and how to avoid them
There have been ways to generate CloudFormation templates using general-purpose programming languages since 2013. As such, there have been many learning opportunities even before the CDK was released. In this talk, we will look at some mistakes we made in those years to avoid them in the future.
Intermediate Level
Ben Bridts
AWS Community Hero and APN Ambassador @ Cloudar
Observability for CI/CD
What is observability? It's just a fancy term for 'how easily you can understand problems on your stack.' As such, deployments and other stack changes are a critical part of observability. We'll discuss how you can use the CDK to store clear, concise info on changes.
Intermediate Level
Nočnica Fee
Developer Advocate at New Relic
Lightning Talks
These are 10 minute sessions with no Q&A. There are four levels of talk targeted at different experience levels:
- - Introductory and Overview (suitable for brand new to CDK)
- - Intermediate (have used CDK a bit)
- - Advanced (use CDK regularly)
- - Expert (love everything about CDK)
A Cloud newbie's experience with CDK
Have you ever felt a bit lost when exposed to a new technology in a new job? Have you ever found a tool that helped you to get up to speed? In my talk I’d like to share why a beginner level AWS user should check out CDK, and how it's helping me to overcome some professional and personal challenges.
Introductory and Overview Level

Oksana Horlock
Software Developer at 67Bricks
Amplify to CDK!
You built a nice PoC with Amplify and now you want to go to the next level with CDK (multi account pipeline, trunk based developement, not a fan of CFN or whatever other reason you may have to do this move). Let's learn how to reuse Amplify generated Cloudformation and folder structure with CDK!
Intermediate Level

Florian Chazal
AWS - Senior Solutions Architect
CDK-Dia - Automated diagrams for CDK infrastructure
In this talk, I will introduce CDK-Dia. A tool that diagrams Infrastructure based on CDK stacks. The tool leverages CDK's tree structure in order to produce diagrams with a coherent structure. CDK-Dia additionally includes decorators which one can use to customize the diagrams.
Intermediate Level
Tom Roshko
Cloud developer
cdk8s, the future of Kubernetes application deployments?
Learn what cdk8s is about, what happened to it during the last year and what's to come in the future.
Introductory and Overview Level

Max Brenner
Freelance DevOps Engineer
Creating Verifiable JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) with AWS CDK
My daughter loves cookies and tries to sneak them onto our JSON-based grocery list. Let's put a stop to that. We'll use projen to create a CDK App with 3 lambda functions, 1 S3 Bucket, 1 Secret and a RestAPI for encoding and decoding JSON Web Tokens. That can verify our JWT-based grocery list.
Intermediate Level

Matt Martz
AWS Community Builder
Enjoy Writing CDK Constructs Using projen and jsii
Writing your CDK constructs, testing and releasing them to various repositories takes time and effort. projen and jsii aim to reduce this complexity but also introduce new ones. This talk walks you through the projen setup process and pitfalls I have encountered when writing my CDK constructs.
Intermediate Level
Sebastian Hesse
Freelance Software Engineer
Orchestrating Serverless Bioinformatics Workflows with CDK
This session looks into how our team uses CDK to automate the infrastructure required for running in-house bioinformatics workflows so that they are cost effective, scalable, and have a quick turn around time.
Advanced Level
Joshua Brenneman
Nationwide Children's Hospital - The Institute of Genomic Medicine - Bioinformatics Software Developer
Kyle Voytovich
DevOps Engineer, Institute for Genomic Medicine, Nationwide Children's Hospital
Publishing external projen modules as private GitHub packages
Leveraging external projen modules is extremely powerful when managed correctly. This talk shows how to quickly configure a jsii project to support private GitHub packages and scoped npm login for internal use.
Intermediate Level

Ken Winner
Engineer @ Stedi
Serverless Experience With CDK
My introductory session will be about the experience I had when building a serverless application with CDK.
Introductory and Overview Level
Galaletsang Morake
AWS Certified Solutions Architect & Cloud Practitioner
Why Security Pros Should Embrace the CDK!
Are you a security professional who has engineering teams using the CDK? Or responsible for building infrastructure as code for security automation? In this lighting talk I will dive in why the CDK actually enables teams to more easily develop secure software on AWS!
Introductory and Overview Level

Dakota Riley
Security Engineer at Stedi, Inc
What Will CDK Day Be Like?
We want the whole event to be fun! Our first CDK Day took place in September 2020. It was a mix of getting started sessions through to advanced topics from familiar faces as well as some new faces in the community. We have collected all of the talks together in a rewind page for you to enjoy.
Watch with 3,000 of your closest friends!

Here is the full day recording:
Where Can I Learn About CDK?
If you want to chat to real CDK users, then join the cdk.dev slack space. If you want to see working examples of AWS CDK, then check out CDK Patterns. You can learn the history of CDK by reading this AWS Open Source Blog post
Alternatively, you can follow @cdkday on Twitter for the latest news about the next CDK Day.
Our Code of Conduct
The CDK Day Conference is a community event intended to provide learning opportunities for all users of the CDK and related libraries.
We value the participation of each and every member and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Accordingly, all attendees are expected to show respect and courtesy to other attendees throughout the event and on related community forums.
To make clear what is expected, all attendees, speakers, organizers, and volunteers are required to conform to our Code of Conduct.
No Official Sponsors
This is a free event for everyone so we didn't need to raise any funds to throw it but we do have supporting groups
The Organising Committee
The group who came together to make this happen are from all across the globe and work for several different companies

Matt Coulter
Architect in Liberty IT & AWS DevTools Hero. I love community sharing so I started CDK Day and created cdkpatterns.com
Sathyajith Bhat
Author: Practical Docker With Python. AWS Community Hero. 2x Mod, @StackExchange. DevOps @AdobeIO, hubster to @joshenoy, Gamer. Runs @AWSUGBLR & @BarcampBNG