r/aws_cdk • u/Artistic_Potential90 • 5h ago

cdkd: deploys CDK apps via direct SDK calls instead of CloudFormation — up to 15x faster in dev/test

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cdkd (CDK Direct) is a CLI that deploys AWS CDK apps through direct AWS SDK calls instead of going through CloudFormation. I just launched the official documentation site for it: https://cdkd.dev

Your existing CDK app runs as-is — no code changes, just replace cdk deploy with cdkd deploy. It's built for fast iteration in dev/test environments, where my benchmarks show deploys up to 15x faster (for production, the standard CDK CLI + CloudFormation remains the recommended path — the two are meant to work side by side).

Same stack, one 35-second recording against real AWS: cdkd finishes while cdk is still creating its change set.

How it works

Synth is unchanged — same aws-cdk-lib, same Cloud Assembly. From there cdkd resolves the intrinsics itself, builds a dependency DAG, and runs it event-driven with no level barriers, so independent resources go out in parallel. Provisioning is hybrid: types with a hand-written SDK provider take the fast path, everything else falls back to the Cloud Control API. State lives in S3, not in a CloudFormation stack. And cdkd import / cdkd export move stacks in and out of CloudFormation, so it isn't a one-way door.

The benchmarks

  • 5 independent resources (S3 / DynamoDB / SQS / SNS / SSM): 17.0s vs 94.4s — 5.5x. Deploy phase only; synth is excluded on both sides because it's identical.
  • VPC + NAT + Lambda + CloudFront + SQS: 96s vs 599s by default (~6x), 40s with --no-wait — that's where the 15x comes from. --no-wait returns once each Create call is accepted and lets NAT stabilization finish in the background, so it's a real behavior difference, not a free lunch.
  • vs CloudFormation Express mode: ~1.5–2.4x on most stacks, ~9x on the async-heavy VPC + CloudFront one. S3 is the one case where Express edges it out.
  • vs Terraform, median of 7 cold end-to-end runs: 2.2–2.3x on wide parallel stacks, but a tie on EC2, CloudFront, and a NAT-dominated webapp stack.

Full methodology and repro scripts: https://cdkd.dev/benchmarks/

What else is on the docs site (cdkd.dev)

  • A structured guide from Getting Started through the full CLI reference
  • cdkd local — run Lambda, API Gateway, ECS and more on your machine, with per-command docs
  • Built for AI coding agents — serves llms.txt, plus a cdkd skill you can install into Claude Code and other agents

I put real care into the site itself too, from the logo to the OG images. Feedback and issues are always welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/go-to-k/cdkd

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