cdkd (CDK Direct)

The fastest way to deploy AWS CDK.

Drop-in CDK CLI for existing CDK apps — up to 15x faster deploys via direct AWS SDK calls instead of CloudFormation.

📚 Documentation: cdkd.dev

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• Drop-in CDK compatible: your existing CDK app code runs as-is; just replace cdk deploy with cdkd deploy.
• Up to 15x faster deploys: direct SDK calls, aggressive parallelization, and --no-wait to skip slow stabilization waits; faster than Terraform and CloudFormation Express mode too (see Benchmark).

cdkd complements the AWS CDK CLI rather than replacing it. Use cdkd in dev/test for rapid iteration; use the AWS CDK CLI in production for full CloudFormation tooling. Install cdkd alongside an existing cdk deploy workflow: no migration needed. You can also import existing stacks into cdkd or export back to CloudFormation anytime.

A natural fit for AI-driven development. AI coding agents iterate in tight spin-up / tear-down loops — and cdkd keeps each turn short, with fast deploys and an equally fast cdkd destroy that deletes via direct SDK calls instead of polling a CloudFormation stack-delete.

Local execution from your deployed stack. cdkd local runs your functions, APIs, and ECS tasks on your machine. It can resolve env vars, secrets, and resource references from your real deployed stack: no hand-written .env files, no hand-seeded test data (see Local execution).

Important

cdkd is for dev/test workflows only — early in development, not yet production-ready.

Installation

npm i -g @go-to-k/cdkd          # latest release
npm i -g @go-to-k/cdkd@0.0.2    # pin to a specific version

The installed binary is cdkd. It requires Node.js 22.12 or later.

Quick Start

First-time setup: run cdkd bootstrap once per AWS account before any other command; it replaces cdk bootstrap, which cdkd does not require (details in Getting Started).

# Bootstrap (creates S3 state bucket + asset storage — one-time setup per AWS account)
cdkd bootstrap

# List stacks in the CDK app
cdkd list

# Deploy your CDK app
cdkd deploy

# Deploy at maximum speed: skip slow stabilization waits
cdkd deploy --no-wait

# Check what would change
cdkd diff

# Tear down
cdkd destroy

Use with AI Coding Agents

This repository ships a cdkd skill that teaches AI coding agents to use cdkd safely (AI agents guide).

Claude Code

Install it as a plugin (one-time setup) by running these inside a Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add go-to-k/cdkd
/plugin install cdkd-skills@cdkd

Then ask Claude to deploy a dev/test CDK stack with cdkd — the skill triggers automatically — or invoke it directly with /cdkd.

Other agents (Codex, Cursor, and more)

Any agent that supports the SKILL.md format can use the skill. Install it with the GitHub CLI (v2.90+) or npx skills:

gh skill install go-to-k/cdkd cdkd
# or
npx skills add go-to-k/cdkd --skill cdkd

Contributors

To test the current checkout against another CDK project, clone this repository and add it to a Claude Code session — the project-scoped /use-cdkd skill covers building and linking the checkout:

claude --add-dir /path/to/cdkd

Documentation

Full documentation lives at cdkd.dev:

• Getting Started
• CLI Reference
• Local Execution
• Import / Export — CloudFormation migration
• Troubleshooting

Benchmark

cdkd deploys up to 15x faster than AWS CDK (CloudFormation) on SDK-Provider-handled stacks; the per-stack speedup widens with size and parallelism.

vs CloudFormation Express mode: up to 9x faster

CloudFormation's Express mode is a fast-deploy option that skips resource stabilization waits, similar in spirit to cdkd's --no-wait. Even so, cdkd is faster than Express on nearly every stack, and with --no-wait it pulls dramatically ahead on stacks dominated by async resources.

Stack	Normal (CFn)	Express	cdkd	cdkd --no-wait
VPC + Lambda + SQS + CloudFront	562	366	96	40
DynamoDB	34	34	19	15
DynamoDB + KMS	71	55	27	27
EC2	44	31	27	26
Lambda	55	34	23	22
S3	39	22	23	24
SQS	83	22	9	9
SQS + CloudWatch	87	44	30	31

Best of 3 runs, deploy-phase only, seconds, us-west-2.

vs Terraform: cdkd deploys faster

We also raced cdkd against Terraform: the same logical stacks expressed both as CDK apps and as Terraform HCL, deployed against real AWS. cdkd is clearly faster in four of six scenarios — 1.23x to 2.31x, with fully separated run distributions — and statistically tied in the rest.

Scenario	Stack	cdkd	Terraform	CloudFormation	cdkd --no-wait
wide	48 independent resources (S3 / DynamoDB / SQS / SNS / SSM / Logs, 8 each)	20.0	46.1	89.1	21.1
serverless	Lambda ×3 + HTTP API + DynamoDB + SNS / SQS + EventBridge	25.9	57.5	127.1	24.6
ec2	VPC + subnet + SG + IAM role + EC2 instance ×3	29.1	35.9	193.9	22.0
webapp	VPC + NAT + subnets + DynamoDB + SQS + S3 + Lambda ×2 + HTTP API	109.7	127.3	166.1	23.4
ecs	VPC ×2 AZ + Fargate cluster / task / service + ALB	162.8	209.5	276.7	34.5
cloudfront — created (fire and forget)	S3 origin + CloudFront + OAC	11.1	10.3 (wait_for_deployment = false)	no such mode	10.4
cloudfront — Deployed	S3 origin + CloudFront + OAC	174.0 (--full-wait)	166.4	232.3	n/a

Cold end-to-end wall clock including synth / plan, median of 7 runs, seconds, us-east-1.

Full methodology, distribution analysis, per-run data, and the complete suite (SDK Provider path, Cloud Control fallback path, the 15x headline stack): cdkd.dev/benchmarks/.

License

Apache 2.0