From AWS CDK to Terraform

As its service scale grew, Inflab has been managing infrastructure by adopting IaC (Infrastructure as Code) instead of the web console. Initially, the company adopted AWS CDK, which allows the use of TypeScript, but faced several limitations during operation.

The biggest reason was the lack of community and documentation. While Terraform has vast StackOverflow data and abundant tutorials, AWS CDK has a relatively smaller community, making it difficult to solve problems.

Differences also emerged in terms of operational maturity.

• Terraform: HCL is declarative and simple in structure, making it easy to focus on infrastructure design, and since code and actual resources correspond 1:1, visibility is high.
• AWS CDK: Using a programming language provides flexibility, but it comes with the complexity of having to consider both infrastructure structure and code structure simultaneously, and since it automatically generates some resources, it makes it hard to grasp the actual configuration.

As a result, Inflab ultimately chose Terraform, which is well documented and has a clear structure, in order to operate efficiently with a small team.