Infrastructure as Code has been adopted by many teams during the last years. It makes provisioning of your infrastructure easy and helps to keep your environments consistent. But by using declarative templates, we still miss many practices that we are used to for “normal” code. You’ve probably already felt the pain that each CloudFormation template is just a copy and paste of your last projects or from Stack Overflow. Can you trust these snippets? How can you align improvements or even security fixes through your codebase? How can you share best practices within your company? This talk gives an introduction to the new AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) which is an imperative way to write CloudFormation templates in the language of your choice (even in Java). Philipp also explains why CDK is such a game changer and how your teams can spend less time with writing CloudFormation templates while even increasing the quality.