Matthew Bonig, Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experiences in CDK, why developers can’t be solely reliant on AI or coding tools to fill in the blanks, and his biggest grievances with AWS. Matthew gives an in-depth look at how and why CDK has been so influential for him, as well as the positive work that Defiance Digital is doing as a managed service provider. Corey and Matthew debate the need for AWS to focus on innovating instead of simply surviving off its existing customer base.About MatthewChief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital. AWS DevTools Hero, co-author of The CDK Book, author of the Advanced CDK Course. All things CDK and Star Trek.Links Referenced:CDK Book: https://www.thecdkbook.com/cdk.dev: https://cdk.devTwitter: https://twitter.com/mattbonigLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbonig/Personal website: https://matthewbonig.comduckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.comTranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. And I’m back with my first recording that was conducted post-re:Invent and all of its attendant glory and nonsense; we might talk a little bit about what happened at the show. But my guest today is the Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Digital, Matthew Bonig. Matthew, thank you for joining me.Matthew: Thank you, Corey. Thanks for having me today.Corey: So, you are deep into the CDK. You’re one of the AWS Dev Tools Heros, and you’re the co-author of the CDK Book, you’ve done a lot, really. You have a course now for Advanced CDK work. Honestly, at this point, it starts to feel like when I say the CDK is a cult, you’re one of the cult leaders, or at least very high up in the cult.Matthew: [laugh] Yes, it was something that I discovered—Corey: Your robe has a fringe on it.Matthew: Yeah, yeah. I discovered this at re:Invent, and it kind of hit me a little surprised that I got called out by a couple people by being the CDK guy. And I didn’t realize that I’d hit that status yet, so I got to get myself a hat, and a cloak, and maybe some fun stuff to wear.Corey: For me, what I saw on the—it was in the run-up to re:Invent, but the big CDK sized announcement was the fact that the new version of Amplify now is much closer tied to the CDK than it was in previous incarnations, which is great. It sort of solves the problem, how do I build a thing through a variety of different tools? Great, and how do I manage that thing programmatically? It seems if, according to what it says on the tin, that it narrows that gap. Of course, here in reality, I haven’t had time to pick anything like that up, and I won’t for months, just because so much comes out all at the same time. What happened in the CDK world? What did I miss? What’s exciting?Matthew: Well, you know, the CDK world has been, I’ve said, fairly mature for a while now. You know, fundamentally the way the CDK works and the functionality within it hasn’t changed drastically. Even when 2.0 came out a couple of years ago, there wasn’t a drastic fundamental change in the way that the API worked. Really, the efforts that we’ve been seeing for the last year or so, and especially the last few months, is trying to button up some functionality, hit some of those edge cases have been rough for some users, and ultimately just continue to fill out things like L2 constructs and maybe try to build out some L3s.I think what they’re doing with Amplify is a good sign that they are trying to, sort of, reach across the aisle and work with other frameworks and work with other systems within AWS to make the experience better