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Why Custom Resources Are Essential for Production Deployments and How to Create Them Using AWS CDK
While working with AWS CDK for some time, I was under the impression that CDK/CloudFormation could handle all my requirements. However, I came to understand that production environments are far more complex than they appear. These environments often involve intricate workflows, dependencies, and unique edge cases that cannot always be addressed by the default capabilities of AWS CDK or CloudFormation.
For instance, tasks like provisioning resources across multiple accounts, implementing specific logic during resource creation, or handling long-running processes often fall outside the scope of standard CDK stacks. According to AWS documentation, these scenarios include:
• Adding a database to an Aurora cluster.
• Creating an admin or test user in a Cognito user pool.
• Managing Route53 DNS entries across AWS accounts.
• Uploading monitoring dashboards to third-party services like DataDog.
To accommodate these unique requirements and overcome such limitations, AWS CDK provides a powerful feature: custom resources.
While custom resources can solve many challenges, they require careful implementation. Mistakes in their design can…
