When should teams use AWS CDK instead of Terraform or CloudFormation—considering construct reuse, programming-language flexibility, drift detection, and team skill sets?

Helps decide between AWS CDK and Terraform based on team expertise, code reuse patterns, drift management, and cloud-provider specificity in 2025.

AWS CDK excels when teams are software developers: allows infrastructure as programmatic constructs in familiar languages (TypeScript, Python, Java, C#), enables ORM-style resource reuse, and integrates easily with CI pipelines. Since CDK synthesizes to CloudFormation templates, it benefits from AWS-native drift detection and change tracking. For multi-cloud or vendor-neutral infrastructure, Terraform retains strength with its cloud-agnostic approach and mature state management. CDK often requires AWS-specific knowledge and follows CloudFormation constraints. Terraform's larger third-party ecosystem and declarative HCL syntax may fit better for ops teams or multi-cloud setups, while CDK’s rapid evolution and AWS-backed tooling suit developer-heavy cloud teams.