Comment by raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago
Why would I ever use this instead of just using the CDK with Python? There is plenty of documentation and my experience is I can one shot my entire IAC with a well defined spec with ChatGPT to generate CDK code.
Yes I know AWS well enough to know whether it is correct
Until there is a resource you need out of the 150+ AWS services that they don’t support or a new feature of an existing resource….
True, I have written my share of CloudFormation custom resources.
Funny anecdote: it was faster for an SA when i was at AWS to create a Terraform module and have it merged into Terraform than it was for us to wait for AWS to add support for the same resource in CloudFormation. They are getting much better now
Also where is this idea that it takes days to ship Python in CDK coming from?
Edit: great, getting downvoted for daring to ask the author to explain a claim. I’m noticing other people asking questions getting downvoted, too. Brigading isn’t a good look.
Stelvio's main selling point here is that you can use our higher-level components for different services and have them automatically configured.
So, you don't have to configure IAM roles, or Env vars manually, as this is handled for you through a concept called linking. https://stelvio.dev/concepts/linking/
In our experience, that alone adds a lot of productivity gains for teams.
Why not use CDK L3 constructs (patterns) or the corresponding for Pulumi, since that's what you generate?
Higher level CDK constructs do the same thing. But honestly, IAC is one of the easiest thing for LLMs to do and there is plenty of documentation to troubleshoot. There is no reason to introduce this into a company instead of using the official CDK.
I respect your point of view.
But coincidentally Stelvio was born out of frustration with CDK which I'm using at my day job for 4 years at this point:
- slow deployment: CDK is layer on top of cloud formation, it first translates to CF which is then moved to AWS and resolved/deployed there. Process is quite slow and if something goes wrong it's hard to debug, rollbacks take ages, sometimes they block due to inter-stack dependencies - CDK is still quite low level and focused on infra. You just can't create say api gateway with 3 routes each using 3 different lambdas with permission to use dynamo table in 4 lines - you an with stelvio - whatever code change you need to test you need to deploy it first which is probably slowest with CDK(compared e.g. to pulumi) then even if you run it you can't really debug it or just see prints, you need to just go thru cloudwath or other services - stelvio allows you to run lambdas in "dev mode" so you don't need to redeploy and run your lambdas locally for instant feedback and even debugging support
Having said that CDK is good tool and I'm happy that it exists as I like it much better than CF itself or Terraform. Stelvio just tries to be even better and focused on developers.
Regarding LLMs sure, problem with LLMs is not they can't generate the code but if you're willing to read and understand all of it. Stelvio is less code with higher abstractions so it's easier to comprehend.
And what assurances are there that you will be around for five years? Or that you will support new services features when they come out?
And I always “disable rollbacks” this has been a feature in CloudFormation, CDK and SAM for years.
Running lambdas locally with SAM has been a feature for at least 5 or six years as with the CDK. But these days you really should be packaging lambdas as Docker containers - those are really easy to test locally without any special infrastructure
True, and there's nothing wrong with them.
We still believe to have a more flexible solution that also adds some features, including combining multiple cloud providers which at the moment we use to enable cloudflare DNS in front of AWS infra. Feel free to give it a try!
In that case just use Terraform with an entire community to support it across all types of infra.
Seems great for really small apps where you want your resource definitions colocated with the code using them. I'd imagine the benefits start to break down as your infrastructure gets more complicated.
The bigger answer is that if you're proficient and happy with CDK or anything else to wire resource up, you're probably not going to see much (if any) benefit.