Serverless Framework and AWS CDK are infrastructure-as-code tools that complement one another. We’ve explained the differences between both tools in this article.

_This article was originally published on The Chief I/O: _Serverless Framework vs. AWS CDK

Serverless Framework is the most popular and widely used  tool for building serverless applications. However, since AWS introduced AWS CDK, it has gained ground among developers who build serverless applications, especially on AWS.

What are the differences between these two tools?

Will AWS CDK eventually replace Serverless Framework?

These are some of the questions we will discuss in this article.

What is Serverless Framework?

Serverless Framework is an open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool and development framework that allows you to build and deploy serverless applications. It’s an easy-to-use framework that enables you to define your serverless application resources in a YAML file then deploy the application on  multiple cloud providers. It takes the resource definition in a “serverless.yml” file then converts it to a template of the specified cloud provider.

What is AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)?

Amazon Web Service (AWS) CDK is an open source serverless application development framework that enables you to define cloud resources for your serverless applications using programming languages like TypeScript, Python, and Java then deploy it on AWS Lambda.

What are the differences between Serverless Framework and AWS CDK?

Even though both tools are easy to use and serve the same purposes, some notable differences set them apart.

Cloud Agnosticism

The main difference between AWS CDK and Serverless Framework is cloud agnosticism. Serverless Framework allows you to build and deploy serverless applications for all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. On the other hand, CDK is a serverless IaC tool specific to Amazon Cloud Services alone.

Think of this as Terraform or Pulumi vs. CloudFormation. While Terraform and Pulumi are used by developers and DevOps professionals to create and provision infrastructure for multiple cloud providers, CloudFormation does exactly the same but only for AWS.

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