AWS CDK Construct Snippets for VS Code

This extension adds L1 Construct snippets from AWS CDK in Visual Studio Code.

[!TIP] We eliminate AWS complexity so you ship faster, spend less, and stay compliant.

Our managed AWS service gives you three things: a production-grade AWS CDK Landing Zone with built-in compliance controls, proactive monitoring that stops cost waste and security drift, and senior AWS expertise that speeds up your team's delivery.

Book a free demo to see where you stand and what we'd fix first:

⚡ See the symptoms of a missing AWS foundation and how we solve them

AWS starts simple. Then you scale: production and staging blur together, resources multiply without owners, IAM policies accumulate exceptions, security findings pile up in backlogs, and the bill climbs month after month.

Those are symptoms of a missing AWS foundation. Without one, your developers spend more time fixing problems than shipping features.

We provide that foundation and own it entirely, so your team focuses on shipping, not firefighting.

Here's what's included:

1. We Provision a Secure AWS CDK Landing Zone That Accelerates Compliance

• Multi-account architecture with security controls and compliance guardrails from day one
• Scores 100% on the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and 96% on AWS Foundational Security Best Practices
• Those benchmarks map straight to SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS controls, cutting months from your compliance timeline

2. We Monitor Proactively to Stop Cost Waste and Security Drift

• Quarterly cost reviews catch unattached volumes, oversized instances, and orphaned resources before they compound. AWS spend drops 20-30% on average, with outliers hitting 60+%
• Continuous security monitoring across all accounts catches misconfigurations immediately. You get alerts while issues are still fixable, not after they're breaches

3. We Provide Senior AWS Expertise That Speeds Up Delivery

• Your developers get production-ready IaC templates for common patterns: multi-AZ applications, event-driven architectures, secure data pipelines. What takes weeks of research ships in hours
• Architecture guidance on VPC design, IAM policies, disaster recovery, and observability from engineers who've solved these problems at enterprise scale

"We achieved a perfect security score in days, not months." Galen Simmons, CEO of Accolade (Y Combinator startup)

Snippet modes

Use l1-s3-bucket for a compact template containing required properties. Append -full, for example l1-s3-bucket-full, to include optional properties. Existing prefixes now use the compact mode.

Full snippets expand up to 4 levels and 400 lines. Deeper structures become editable placeholders. Both languages target the same CDK version, pinned in package.json; update older project SDKs before using newly introduced constructs or properties.

Features

1. SDK-backed Coverage: Includes the L1 constructs available in the pinned AWS CDK release, with property names taken from the TypeScript and Python SDKs.
2. Effortless Autocomplete: Activate autocomplete with l1-<cloudformation-resource> to streamline your coding process.
3. Weekly Updates: The update workflow checks for new AWS CDK releases, refreshes both languages together, and publishes only when extension content changes.
4. Placeholder Support: Navigate efficiently through resource properties using the Tab key, thanks to built-in placeholder functionality.
5. Required Property Highlighting: Required SDK properties carry a // Required comment in TypeScript or # Required in Python.
6. Documentation at Your Fingertips: Access the corresponding CDK resource documentation directly from the autocomplete prompt, enriching your development experience.

Usage

1. Install the CDK Snippets extension in VS Code.
2. Open your CDK project (TypeScript or Python).
3. Add L1 constructs using their short prefix (e.g. l1-s3-bucket for s3.CfnBucket).

Insert snippets inside a CDK construct or stack, where this (TypeScript) or self (Python) is available. Add the imports used by the snippet:

import * as cdk from 'aws-cdk-lib';
import { aws_s3 as s3 } from 'aws-cdk-lib';

import aws_cdk as cdk
from aws_cdk import aws_s3

Other services use the corresponding namespace, such as aws_lambda in Python and lambda in TypeScript. Python full snippets containing dates also need import datetime.

These are editable templates. Replace placeholder values, choose the settings your resource requires, and remove unused optional settings before synthesizing. Required SDK arguments do not express every CloudFormation constraint, such as mutually exclusive properties.

Example:

Note: Once you start typing a prefix (explained in step 3), the corresponding snippet shows up in the dropdown menu. If this doesn't happen automatically, press ctrl + space to invoke IntelliSense and search for the prefix of the resource type that you want to add (as listed in step 3).

AWS CDK Examples

Explore our AWS CDK Examples repository - a rich collection of TypeScript-based solutions that bring your cloud architecture to life. Crafted by a seasoned AWS professional.

Support

If you have a feature request or an issue, please let me know on Github

Author

Danny Steenman