Posts on agh1973

CDK Integration Tests and the Alpha Package Version Dance

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

So… we have a bunch of small CDK construct libraries that are mostly just a Lambda function. We added integration tests, like you do these days. And renovate, because we aren’t barbarians. And then I got this error while trying to address stupid nodejs runtime issues:

TypeError: (0 , core_1.determineLatestNodeRuntimeName) is not a function

The root cause is simple: CDK’s alpha packages (@aws-cdk/integ-tests-alpha, @aws-cdk/integ-runner) must exactly match your aws-cdk-lib version. And when you’re using Projen with experimentalIntegRunner: true, it adds these packages as latest, which works great until it doesn’t.

The NODEJS_LATEST Saga: A CDK Runtime Version Tale (with a Happy Ending)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

I am of the strong opinion that infrastructure as code should actually, you know, manage your infrastructure. So you don’t have to.

That’s kind of the whole point of CDK.

Which is why it was so frustrating when our security team (reasonably!) demanded we update hundreds of Lambda functions to Node 22, and CDK’s NODEJS_LATEST was stuck on Node 18. And then Node 18 hit end-of-life in April 2025… and NODEJS_LATEST was still pointing at it.

JetBrains Mono

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

I spend most of my days reading stuff, and most of that stuff is in vscode or iTerm2. So… fonts really matter to me. This article is about using the new JetBrains Mono fonts in vscode and iTerm2.

Install on Mac Link to heading

JetBrains Mono has a download link. If your laptop didn’t already do it, unzip the file. On my laptop, I ended up with ~/Downloads/JetBrainsMono-2/fonts/. You can pick and choose which ones you want to manually install or… install them all:

Picking a NodeJS Repository

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

When working with CDK in an enterprise environment, you will almost certainly want to create a library of your own constructs. That library is probably going to be private and is going to need to live somewhere. The traditional place for nodejs libraries to live is npmjs.com. However, there are some alternatives available.

Criteria Link to heading

Availability: How likely is the service to actually be working at any given time
Cost: How much $$$
ACL: Access and Control
DevOps Ease of Use: My opinion about how easy it is to use
Developer Ease of Use: My opinion about how easy it is for my developers to use

The Contenders Link to heading

npmjs Link to heading

The incumbent.

Projen

Sat, 22 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

One of the things that’s worth noting about the hugo-cdk project is how much, well… boilerplate is involved.

We have:

.gitignore
.npmignore
.prettierrc.js
jest.config.js
package-lock.json
package.json
tsconfig.json

And none of these are really central to the actual project code. And… they’re also pretty important files. Which… I don’t really understand as well as I’d like to. For example, I’d like to do a really great job of linting, but I don’t want to spend a bunch of time learning the intricacies of eslint. Surely there must be a better way than googling around the interwebs for someone else’s configs?

CDK Bootstrap v4

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

Running along happily with cdk and then it barfs out this at you:

[+] Unknown Rules: {"CheckBootstrapVersion":{"Assertions":[{"Assert":{"Fn::Not":[{"Fn::Contains":[["1","2","3"],{"Ref":"BootstrapVersion"}]}]},"AssertDescription":"CDK bootstrap stack version 4 required. Please run 'cdk bootstrap' with a recent version of the CDK CLI."}]}}

What to do?

tl;dr: Link to heading

AWS_ACCOUNT_NUMBER=263869919117
CDK_NEW_BOOTSTRAP=1 npx cdk bootstrap aws://${AWS_ACCOUNT_NUMBER}/us-east-1 --cloudformation-execution-policies arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess

yarn > npm

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

I was recently tackling yet another annoying import confusion while upgrading CDK. I was asking questions on one of the slack channels about this problem and eventually someone asked me “are you using npm instead of yarn? Why?” I didn’t have a good answer. I don’t have much background at all with nodejs, so I had just been using npm. Well…

Deploying a Static Site on AWS with CDK

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

We’ve covered a bunch of other ground, but now it’s time to actually deploy the static site.

A Static Site Link to heading

Referring back to our diagram, it’s clear that the first thing after the CodeBuild, which we are doing separately, is an S3 bucket.

export class StaticSite extends cdk.Construct {
 constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string) {
 super(scope, id);

 const bucket = new s3.Bucket(this, 'Bucket', {});
 }
}

This gets our first layer of boiler-plate out of the way. We’ve declared StaticSite as a class and based it on the cdk.Construct. Then we declared an S3 bucket. With no properties. Ok, but… S3 buckets are more useful when they have names. And… our website is going to have a name. S3 bucket names are required to be globally unique, and dns names are by definition globally unique. Let’s use the name of the website for the name of the bucket. This has the added benefit of improving the discoverability of the system since you can pretty quickly associate the DNS and the S3 bucket when the have the same name.

Persisting EBS Volumes on EC2

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

Recently I was tasked with spinning up an ec2 instance with some attached ebs “disks”. This isn’t generally how I roll. It’s old-school, the opposite of the modern, serverless / on-demand way. It drove me to write some particularly clever bash code to manage /etc/fstab. I hate writing clever bash code. It never turns out well. I can imagine this being useful to someone else who gets stuck solving this problem. I sincerely hope it won’t ever be useful to me again.

Node Lambdas - A Better Way

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

In Getting Started with CDK, I wrote “I noticed that cdk has a pattern of using a lambdas directory and then having sub-directories for every lambda”. Well, I was wrong, or maybe things have just changed. Either way, we’re going to update hugo-cdk to follow the new pattern.

The New Pattern Link to heading

Recently, cdk was updated to add bundling support. We didn’t need bundling with our previous lambda, because it doesn’t depend on any libraries. The new pattern is still a more elegant approach, so lets take a look at the fancy but plainly named aws-lambda-nodejs.

CDK Composition

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

So far in this series, we have set up the basics of a Hugo blog and push the code to GitHub and bootstrapped a cdk application and used it to deployed a lambda. Then your faithless narrator wandered off for a month, and when he came back nagged you about upgrading cdk. Our next step is to deploy the rest of what was described in serving static sites with AWS. That’s going to require us to add a few more things to our cdk app, so now is a good time to talk about apps, stacks and constructs.

Upgrading CDK

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

Well, “catch you next week” was a bit optimistic. My writing goal of a blog post per week might need to be updated to one per month. On the topic of updates and sustainability, today I’m going to talk about updating cdk.

But Why Update Link to heading

It’s 2020. Almost 2021. Let’s all agree that software has bugs. Keeping things patched is just a reality of life. Also, cdk is moving pretty quickly these days. It is usually less work to make multiple small upgrades than a single large one.

Getting Started with CDK

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

aws-cdk was the new hotness at AWS re:Invent 2019, going from about 4 presentations in 2018 to something like 40 presentations. That’s an order of magnitude increase. And that is the kind of thing that gets my attention. cdk offers IaC that is… code. It’s not a dsl (looking at you, Terraform). Nor is it an attempt to overwhelm you with JSON or YAML verbosity. It’s… just… TypeScript. And that turns out to be powerful.

Serving a Static Site with AWS

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do Something Easy in AWS Link to heading

AWS is all about making undifferentiated heavy lifting easy. Here, I will talk about serving static web content. The AWS way to serve static web content involves putting that content in an S3 bucket, and then delivering it using their CloudFront CDN. There are a few other parts involved, but here are the things you will need to bring to the party.

Getting Started With Hugo

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Link to heading

I guess every Hugo based technical blog has a mandatory first post on the topic of getting started with Hugo. This is gonna be a short one… because so far, Hugo has been entirely straight forward to use. Took me about 20 minutes to get this working.

Why Another Blog, Dude Link to heading

First of all, my pronouns are “them/they” or “he/him/brah”. And second, because while I’ve done CI for Hugo before, I had forgotten how. I spent about an hour talking the ear off Chris about how cool AWS static content delivery was. And how I could blast together something in the also-very-cool aws-cdk in like an hour for his Hugo sites. Then life happened and… I was a bad friend.