Prerequisites

AWS CLI

The AWS CLI allows you to interact with AWS services from a terminal session. Make sure you have the latest version of the AWS CLI installed on your system.

See the AWS Command Line Interface installation page for more details.

AWS account and access

To get started with the workshop you need to have Administrator Access to an AWS Account. Please do not use the accounts root user since this is bad practice and leads to potential security risks.

We recommend you create a dedicated IAM user following this guide.

Make sure, that you are able to login into the AWS Console with your IAM user.

Use aws configure to setup your AWS account.

aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: YOUR KEY
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: YOUR SECRET KEY
Default region name [None]: eu-central-1
Default output format [None]: json

Now try the following:

aws sts get-caller-identity

In the output you should see something similar to arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/Alice.

NodeJS

The AWS CDK uses Node.js (>= 10.3.0).

  • To install Node.js visit the node.js website.

    • Windows: if you have an old version of Node.js installed on your system, it may be required to run the .msi installation as Administrator.

  • If you already have Node.js installed, verify that you have a compatible version:

    node --version

    Output should be >= 10.3.0:

    v10.3.0

Install the AWS CDK

Next, we’ll install the AWS CDK Toolkit. The toolkit is a command-line utility which allows you to work with CDK apps.

Open a terminal session and run the following command:

  • Windows: you’ll need to run this as an Administrator
  • POSIX: on some systems you may need to run this with sudo
npm install -g aws-cdk@1.57

You can check the toolkit version:

cdk --version
1.57

Bootstrap CDK for your AWS Account

This needs to be done only once per AWS Account (co-ordinate by yourselves who is going to do this)

cdk bootstrap <aws-account-id>/eu-central-1

where aws-account-id is the account id without dashes.

Java and Gradle

You will also need Java JDK 1.8 or higher and the latest version of Gradle.