Q-Bits : Setting Up Lambda Functions in CDK

Welcome to another installment of Q-Bits, our regular series showcasing cool ways Amazon employees are leveraging Amazon Q Developer. In this article, we'll explore how Amazon Q enhances developer productivity, provides contextual recommendations, and helps maintain AWS best practices when deploying an AWS Lambda function with AWS CDK in Python. Amazon Q Developer aids in generating Lambda function constructs, explaining code asset bundling, demonstrating integration with API Gateway, and providing examples of Lambda event source mappings.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has transformed how we build and manage AWS cloud resources programmatically. AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) automates AWS resource management using modern programming languages. Now, with Amazon Q Developer, we're witnessing another leap forward in Infrastructure development and DevOps productivity. Let's explore how Amazon Q can assist in CDK development. I have enabled the Amazon Q in VS Code IDE and the screenshots are taken from VS Code.

To get started you will need the following:

One of the primary ways Amazon Q enhances your CDK workflow is through the generation of sample/generic code for CDK constructs. At first, I would prompt Q “Help me write a code for a sample Lambda function that integrates with AWS API Gateway. The code should follow AWS CDK constructs and written in python. Show me detailed steps of initializing CDK environment”

Amazon Q developer lists the steps, including suggesting a local directory creation and CDK initialization in Python. It further lists installation of dependencies and required packages including bootstrapping and deploying the code.

With this comprehensive recommendation, I just quickly reviewed suggested code and customized it a bit to deploy the Lambda function using CDK. Here is the Lambda stack and app.py generated by Amazon Q Developer.

To ensure the code is aligned to best practices and scan for any vulnerabilities, I asked Amazon Q to review the code using /review prompt at the workspace level:

In the above, you can see Amazon Q flagged a High severity issue with the Lambda function code of not having tracing enabled and also suggests a quick fix. I accepted the quick fix and the following is the resultant code:

I went ahead and deployed the changes using cdk deploy as suggested by Amazon Q Developer.

A quick verification of the completion status of the resources in my AWS account specified during bootstrapping.

To verify, I use curl to issue a GET request to the API Gateway endpoint that is in front of the Lambda function and expect a hello response.

In the above example, you saw how powerful an ally Amazon Q Developer can be in your CDK development workflow. It significantly enhances the developer experience by:

To cleanup, you can run cdk destroy to delete all the resources that are created.

In conclusion, Amazon Q Developer can help elevate your development experience. Happy coding!

Have you tried using Amazon Q for your CDK development? Share your experiences in the comments below!