Amazon Connect deployments using the CDK
A highlight of a sample project that I helped with. The goal was to demonstrate a Connect solution deployed fully as infrastructure-as-code (IaC).
Troy Parrett
Amazon Employee
Published Nov 12, 2024
Amazon Connect is a cloud based contact center and it is capable of interacting with many other cloud based resources. Using IaC can be very valuable foundational element to a solution. If you’re not familiar with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) or IaC, I highly recommend taking some time to learn. AWS CloudFormation is a service that takes YAML or JSON described resources to manage the lifecycle associated with creating, updating, and deleting them. The CDK is an open-source software development framework for imperative development to create those templates and deploy them. Similar to importing modules of code, it uses a concept known as constructs. Think of these as layers of abstraction. Level 1 is a direct mapping to resources in AWS CloudFormation. Level 2 constructs exist to help implement well-known sane default patterns in fewer lines of code. Level 3 combines things into macro-patterns of services and resources. I’m also blown away by the help of Amazon Q Developer in creating this. I know Q is also a great way to speed up the learning process for something new, so I’ll demonstrate that here and use it to highlight some key things in this example that make it somewhat unique. In this case, I used the chat feature of Amazon Q for Developer and requested short paragraphs for a blog post. Below are my prompts and their responses! The prompt was generated by highlighting the code in VSCode and then using the “Send to Prompt” shortcut where I was able to type in my prompt string below.
In this code snippet, we're creating a serverless function using AWS Lambda through the CDK framework. The function, named 'HelloLambda', is configured to run on Python 3.12, AWS's latest supported Python runtime. The handler parameter points to 'lambda_function.lambda_handler', indicating that our code will look for a function named 'lambda_handler' within a file called 'lambda_function.py'. The code itself is sourced from a local directory named 'hellolambda', which CDK will package and deploy automatically. This straightforward configuration demonstrates the simplicity and elegance of infrastructure as code, allowing us to define Lambda functions with just a few lines of TypeScript in our CDK application.
In this example, we demonstrate how to leverage AWS CDK's Custom Resource construct to handle a crucial gap in Amazon Connect's CloudFormation capabilities - the association between phone numbers and contact flows. While CloudFormation allows us to create Connect instances, phone numbers, and contact flows, it doesn't natively support linking these components together. The Custom Resource pattern elegantly solves this by wrapping the Connect API calls for associating and disassociating phone numbers with contact flows. The code handles both the initial creation/update phase through theAssociatePhoneNumberContactFlowCommandand cleanup during stack deletion viaDisassociatePhoneNumberContactFlowCommand. This approach ensures proper resource lifecycle management and maintains infrastructure as code principles, while the included IAM policy ensures the custom resource has precisely the permissions needed to perform these operations.
In this CDK code snippet, we're creating an Amazon Connect contact flow using Infrastructure as Code. The interesting part lies in how we handle the flow's content. The code reads a JSON file containing the contact flow configuration and performs a clever string replacement operation. UsingreadFileSync, it loads the 'MainFlow.json' file and converts it to a string. The subsequentreplace()method swaps out a placeholder text "HelloLambdaArnValue" with the actual Lambda function ARN. This technique is particularly useful when you need to dynamically inject AWS resource ARNs into your contact flows during deployment, ensuring that your flow correctly references the Lambda function created in your stack. It's a clean way to maintain contact flow templates that can be version controlled and automatically updated with the correct resource references during deployment
Hopefully this post is helpful to you and demonstrates the value of the CDK and using Q Developer to think through things.
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.