This is the (unofficial) AWS CDK Serverless Plugin. It allows you to use the magic of CDK from within the Serverless framework, so you can combine all the power of defining your infrastructure in a real, fully-fledged programming language with Serverless' packaging and plugin ecosystem.

From the AWS CDK project's README:

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation.

It offers a high-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively using the power of modern programming languages. Using the CDK’s library of infrastructure constructs, you can easily encapsulate AWS best practices in your infrastructure definition and share it without worrying about boilerplate logic.

CDK supports multiple languages for infrastructure definition, but right now the Serverless plugin only supports JavaScript/TypeScript. If you need support for other languages, feel free to raise an issue or dive into the code yourself!

You install the AWS CDK Serverless plugin similarly to any other plugin, by running:

sls plugin install -n serverless-aws-cdk

Then, you need to set your provider to aws-cdk in your serverless.yml, and set the path to your CDK definition's root module:

provider:
  name: aws-cdk
  cdkModulePath: ./cdk

You'll also need to create a tsconfig.json, telling the TypeScript compiler how to compile your CDK definitions:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "target":"ES2018",
        "module": "commonjs",
        "lib": ["es2016", "es2017.object", "es2017.string"],
        "declaration": true,
        "strict": true,
        "noImplicitAny": true,
        "strictNullChecks": true,
        "noImplicitThis": true,
        "alwaysStrict": true,
        "noUnusedLocals": false,
        "noUnusedParameters": false,
        "noImplicitReturns": true,
        "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": false,
        "inlineSourceMap": true,
        "inlineSources": true,
        "experimentalDecorators": true,
        "strictPropertyInitialization":false
    },
    "exclude": ["cdk.out/**/*", "node_modules/**/*"]
}

serverless-aws-cdk transpiles infrastructure code to *.js and *.d.ts files, and it stores state in .serverless-aws-cdk-assembly. You may want to add those to your .gitignore. An example .gitignore is as follows (note: the following assumes your CDK code is under /cdk):

/.serverless/
/.serverless/
/node_modules/
/.log/
/.serverless-aws-cdk-assembly/
/cdk/**/*.js
/cdk/**/*.d.ts

Finally, your CDK infrastructure must be defined in a class named Infrastructure within the defined cdkModulePath. In this instance, you can create a file named cdk/index.ts containing the following:

import { api as ServerlessAwsCdk } from 'serverless-aws-cdk';
import * as cdk from '@aws-cdk/core'

export class Infrastructure extends ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureConstruct {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string, props: ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);
  }
}

This is the most minimal definition possible. The props argument to your constructor contains two keys:

• functions, which is a mapping between function key (as defined in serverless.yml) and CDK lambda.Function object;
• self, which is the same object you can refer to in your serverless.yml file with the ${self:...} syntax.

To deploy a stack using the serverless-aws-cdk plugin, all you need to do is run sls deploy as usual. This will show you the progress of your stack updating. As of v0.2.0, CDK infrastructure definitions written in TypeScript are automatically transpiled to JavaScript for your convenience.

In the following example, we create a Lambda function called "{{stage}}-serverless-aws-cdk-example-sample-lambda" and an SQS queue called "cdk-example-queue", and we configure the queue as an event source for the Lambda function.

First, we need to install some dependencies:

npm i @aws-cdk/aws-sqs @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-event-sources

Next, we create the function in serverless.yml. Note that the basic configuration is similar to with the aws provider. However, we don't set up event sources in serverless.yml, since we do that in code later.

service: serverless-aws-cdk-example

frameworkVersion: ">=1.0.0 <2.0.0"

provider:
  name: aws-cdk
  runtime: python3.6

  stage: 'dev'
  cdkModulePath: ./cdk
  region: 'eu-west-1'
  stackName: '${self:provider.stage}-${self:service}'

package:
    exclude:
        - "node_modules/**"

functions:
    sample_lambda:
        handler: handler.handler
        name: ${self:provider.stage}-${self:service}-sample-lambda
        timeout: 10
        include: sample_lambda/**

plugins:
   - serverless-aws-cdk

Our handler is very simple, in sample_lambda.handler.

def handler(event, context):
    for message in event["Records"]:
        print(f'Received message {message["body"]}')

Now, let's define our infrastructure in cdk/index.ts.

import { api as ServerlessAwsCdk } from 'serverless-aws-cdk';
import * as cdk from '@aws-cdk/core'
import * as lambdaevents from '@aws-cdk/aws-lambda-event-sources';
import * as sqs from '@aws-cdk/aws-sqs';

export class Infrastructure extends ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureConstruct {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string, props: ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);
    const sampleLambda = props.functions['sample_lambda'];
    const queue = new sqs.Queue(this, 'SampleQueue', {
        queueName: 'cdk-example-queue'
    });
    sampleLambda.addEventSource(new lambdaevents.SqsEventSource(queue));
  }
}

There are several supported configuration options when using serverless-aws-cdk. If there's something you'd like to configure but which isn't listed here, it may be that you're able to configure it within your CDK code.

These are project-wide settings, applied in the provider block of your serverless.yml.

For example:

provider:
  stage: ${opt:stage, 'dev'}
  stackTags:
  - stage: ${self:provider.stage}
  cfnRole: "arn:aws:iam::1234567890:role/CfnRole"
  deploymentBucket:
    name: "cdk-serverlessdeployment"

These are function- settings, applied in the ${function_name} block of your serverless.yml.

For example:

function:
  function_name:
    runtime: python3.8
    name: foobar
    timeout: 10
    environment:
      FOO: bar

All infrastructure definition with serverless-aws-cdk should be defined in your CDK module. This project intentionally does not copy some functionality over from the AWS provider, on the basis that with the CDK it's simple to define it yourself.

For example, if you wanted to replicate the following function definition for the AWS provider with serverless-aws-cdk:

functions:
  helloworld:
    handler: handler.helloworld
    events:
      - httpApi:
          method: GET
          path: /hello

You'd remove the events block and instead specify it in your CDK module.

export class Infrastructure extends ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureConstruct {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string, props: ServerlessAwsCdk.InfrastructureProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);
    const restApi = new apigateway.RestApi(this, "MyApi", {
      restApiName: `${props.self.provider.stage}-api`,
      deploy: true,
      deployOptions: {
        stageName: props.self.provider.stage
      }
    });

    const hello = restApi.root.addResource('hello');
    const handler = props.functions['helloworld'];
    const lambdaIntegration = new apigateway.LambdaIntegration(handler);
    hello.addMethod('GET', lambdaIntegration);
  }
}

After stack deployment, CDK by default prints out stack Outputs. We recommend using this to print e.g. APIGateway URLs. To print an APIGateway URL at deploy time, you can create stack outputs as follows:

    new cdk.CfnOutput(this, 'BaseApiUrl', { value: restApi.root.url }).overrideLogicalId('BaseApiUrl');
    new cdk.CfnOutput(this, 'HelloApiUrl', { value: hello.url }).overrideLogicalId('HelloApiUrl');

Other properties are accessible through the AWS CDK provider. You can get an instance of it with:

import { AwsCdkProvider } from "serverless-aws-cdk/provider"

// And inside your stack definition...
const provider = props.serverless.getProvider("aws-cdk") as AwsCdkProvider;

From there, you can call any method on the class. For example:

const accountId = provider.getAccountId();
const region = provider.getRegion();

To deploy your entire stack:

serverless deploy

To deploy a specific function:

serverless deploy -f ${function_name}

To print the diff what's deployed and what your infra specifies:

serverless diff

To destroy the stack:

serverless remove

serverless info

serverless logs

serverless invoke