AWS CDK vs eksctl

[yoan-myparcel]

Hey everyone,

I have been using eksctl for a while now and I am very happy with managing clusters using the manifests format. Recently I've read about AWS CDK and I saw that it supports an API to provision eks clusters as well. I find many aspects appealing. For example, if I want to perform further operations such as provision a new EC2 instance or setup VPC endpoints I can do it in one go.

My understanding is that eksctl provides the toolkit to provision and manage independent clusters with recommended settings. In addition, the AWS documentation emphasizes on examples with eksctl. But what I cannot do using the eksctl manifests is to define further blueprint of the extra features that I wish to add to the cluster's environment.

So I am on a crossroad - I really like to quickly do operations such as rollout new nodegroups with eksctl but meanwhile if I want to recreate an entire environment I have to do a lot of manual extra steps after I am done with the initial eksctl setup.

I was thinking that perhaps a mix between the two is possible but I get the impression that this is not a practice that is generally followed based on my Google searches.

In addition, if I describe my next environment solely with CDK then I will probably not be able to manage it with eksctl.

What are your thoughts about this? I can see some trade-offs using either of the tools. Do you think that a bridge between CDK and eksctl is on the map?

Update: while I was originally writing this I did not know that now eksctl supports a large set of its commands on eksctl-unmanaged clusters. It appears that creating a cluster with CDK and then doing operations on it using eksctl is quite doable. I will keep this topic open though as I am interested if anybody used them together.